Tuesday 23rd February

Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Tue 23 Feb 2016 19:44
09:50.7 S, 032:09.3 W

The barometer is rising steadily but surely as we go south and the SE wind continues: at the moment it's a gentle F4 from just aft of abeam and we are moving along at a bit more than 6 knots without fuss or strain. The seas have been mixed with two wave trains of about equal height, one from the SE as you'd expect and one from the NE so about 90°off. The NE one is gradually abating so motion is becoming more regular which is nice.

Today has been more domestic than of late, with clothes washing (the problem is not washing, one can do that in a gale, but drying. If clothes are hung up below they don't dry in this humidity despite the temperature being 30°C but if hung up in the cockpit a wave will douse them before fully dry, wetting afresh and, worse, putting back the salt one had just washed out) and bread making. James is also contemplating making whitebait for supper; we collected a good handful of whitebait sized flying fish from the scuppers.

The other new thing today was putting the dorade vents back; since Biscay their holes have been plugged because of the likelihood of breakers coming in but it's now calm and hot so we need them. Fiona crawled out of the fore-hatch under the dinghy which is inverted on the foredeck to do it. The cabin temperature at once went up two degrees to 32° but at least there is now a slight breeze below deck and so it should be cooler in the night. The generator ran without hiccup and we ran the watermaker as well so we still have full water tanks.

Taking a sextant sight just for fun at 14:20 UTC James recoded a sextant angle(1) of 89° 50.3'. Not useful for navigation as there's not really an azimuth to pin it to so it's a bit inaccurate but as near 90° as he'll ever see! Tomorrow the sun should be to the north of us.

(1) After correction for semi-diameter, parallax, height of eye etc.