West of Darwin - Day 8 - 12 06.246S 112 22.393E
Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Fri 13 Sep 2013 08:57
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Five things to celebrate in the last 24 hours: we passed
the halfway point, have less than a 1,000 miles to go, have finally passed the
most western point of Australia, had our best noon-to-noon run of the passage by
far (173.9 miles) and it's our wedding anniversary, but not necessarily in
that order!
The wind has increased a bit, up to 16kts at times, and
swung much more to the southeast and even a bit further south at times. We
still have the same sail configuration as yesterday, but have had to push the
windward pole even further forward, which means having to reef that sail more
(as the pole still isn't long enough!) to take the bag out of it. So it's now
really quite small, but with the increase in wind, it does the trick when
combined with the working genoa sheeted normally to leeward, and we're making
anything from 5.5 to 7kts depending on the wind gusts. Add the current to
that and we've been racing along, hence the noon-to-noon
run. Overnight the current increased to 1.8kts at times. We must have
been in the perfect part of the ocean for it as it's dropped back down to
around 1/2kt today. Having passed the most western part of Australia (if we turn
left now and keep going we'll eventually hit Antarctica!) we're getting the
occasional huge swell coming up from the Southern Ocean. It's very long period,
so the sort of swell you imagine you will get on the ocean, but generally never
do! (The Pacific swell was often confused and sometimes short.) It was a quiet
night, no ships at all, but going back to the ships, we were wondering what
they were all carrying and Mike on Jacaranda (about 8 miles behind us)
ask the one that was just about to cut them in half (slight exaggeration, but
they had to call it up and it did have to change course). It's iron
ore, going to China. Started to use the Hydrovane wind steering system (uses no
power) today and so far it's working quite well. In the Pacific it used to get
knocked off course by a large wave and struggled to recover, so we used it
during the day and the electronic autopilot at night. We'll see how we get on in
the Indian Ocean. Should have used it earlier in the week, but we get lazy when
we have enough power to use the electronic pilot. As I write, we have 886 miles
to go.
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