Day 8 - Lecture, Spinnaker and Sextant

Blue Note
Marco M.
Wed 24 Dec 2014 16:16
Date: Wednesday 12/24/14 - Time:  14:30 UTC
Position 12:02.66N  43:19.037W
COG 293M SOG 6.0kt, Wind 72T 11 kt,
Temperatures: Air 29.4C, Sea 24.1C
Last 24h Sailed Distance: 146 NM
Last 24h Decrease Distance on rhumb line: 140 NM
Sailed distance since departure: 1179 NM
Time since departure: 8d 1h 40m
Average Speed since departure: 6.02      kt
Average VMG since departure:   5.02  kt
Intention: sail to Virgin Gorda
Distance to End on rhumb line: 1278 NM
ETA: Friday January 2, 2015

Detailed Track (50 is the maximum number of point, i.e. once the last point reaches 50, the last point always is 50):
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0EIVGO9oiEYLjqAfRxhderm34cEEF9dMP

Yesterday afternoon Chris gave us a beautiful lecture on Christophorus Columbus and its voyage.
Chris did a wonderful work condensing in two hours the three books it had read on the subject.
What all appreciated the most was that he was able to frame Columbus in its time and to explain why he decided to sail west with the hope to reach the Indies and Japan.

Today we are at the boundary of the high pressure region to our North and the winds have decreased a  bit.
In order to keep a good speed we set up the asymmetric spinnaker and we are sailing under a blue hot sky at about 6 knt.
The outside thermometer is recording 29 degrees in the shade. A hot sunny day

All is in order on Blue Note and not having to fix anything (yet) we dedicated our self to play with a Mark3 sextant.
A first time for Blue Note.
The sextant is the cheapest I could find at $58. It proved to be very good and very easy to use and I would say also very well build.

We took two sun altitude at only 30 minutes apart (it should have been longer. By plugging the reading and time into the celestial Navigation add-in to the open source program OpenCPN we got estimated position within about 15 miles of our GPS position.
Excellent results and sufficient for reaching a known Island in the Caribbean.
However is still assume the laptop would be working.

Nirit
Nirit enjoying the shade offered by the spinnaker

Chris
Chris checking that the sextant has a correct index before getting his first sun altitude.