Friday 27th July Further South
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Fri 27 Jul 2012 16:15
(at 15:00 UTC)
We've been sailing through the night - the weather has got progressively warmer and the wind has very gradually moderated (now force 4) meaning we have had a fabulous 48 hours sail at F 5, 6 without the wind being on the nose! We've covered over 360 nautical miles since leaving Isfjord 48 hours ago. The temperature of the water and the air has warmed up noticeably (8 degrees and 10 degrees Celsius respectively). Yesterday Fiona had one glimpse of a very busy, very large Atlantic dolphin as it cruised by effortlessly. Hannah and James saw the plumes from venting whales this morning (sadly not the corporeal whale, they remained sub-surface).
One thing the crew worked out in Svalbard when we had compass issues was that those lovely warm arctic orange wellies have steel toecaps and should one of us sit in the navigators seat the autopilot's flux-gate compass is quite put out. So we are being more careful where we leave our boots to help the self steering system stay on track.
We've made such good progress that Bjornoya is now behind us; in any case conditions were not favourable for stopping there when we were passing. We're thinking about making fruit cake and have had a trip down memory lane thanks to Hannah playing a selection of music from her Ipod - she loaded all her dad's music on it - so also thank you Jon Hudson from the older faction of the crew. We've been able to hear Jon transmitting but he cannot hear us currently as propagation is poor and we don't have the power he has within his transmitter. It is however nice to hear him all the same.