Leg 3 - Marquesas Day 10 - A life on the ocean wave

Caduceus
Martin and Elizabeth Bevan
Thu 13 Mar 2014 01:04

Position           07:37.06S 118:34.35W

Date                1200 (Central American Time) Wednesday 12 March 2014

 

Distance run - 173nm over the ground, 174nm through the water

                        Distance (OG) covered from start 1,747nm

                        Distance to destination 1,231nm

                        Original distance to Marquesas (straight line) 2,962nm

 

Well, what can we say about today?  It was boisterous with a biggish and lumpy quartering sea.  The rising winds yesterday morning that demanded the cruising chute to be taken down continued throughout the day and only decreased towards dusk at which time it would not have been a good move to start putting sails up that could not easily be taken down in the dark.  We made god progress overnight under all plain sail.

 

The nature of the sea dictated that we excavated in the freezer for a chicken curry brick which went down very well.

 

As we have travelled over 1,500 miles west we have decided to put our personal watches back one hour.  Rally time stays at our start time zone.  In addition we also have some things in UTC, so three time zones with which to grapple.

 

A word on watch keeping as opposed to time keeping.  The system that we have employed for some time is to have two six hour watches overnight; 2000/2100 to 0200/0300 which the Mate does and 0200/0300 to 0900 that is the Skipper’s treat, getting the dawn.  This fits in well with our respective sleep patterns and provides the opportunity for some decent undisturbed sleep; subject of course to on-deck calls, the bouncing of the boat and general boat and sail noise.  We are also both getting 2 to 3 hours rest during the day which is enough in the normal course of events to keep us reasonably well rested.

 

Staying awake for the six hour night watches has been made much easier and enjoyable by our purchase of two iPads.  We have a large collection of TV series and movies loaded onto two hard disks which we can transfer to the iPads for night time viewing. We each have our favourite corner of the cockpit to wedge ourselves in comfort where we can see all round and have sight of the instrument displays.  We also run the radar at night which helps pick up vessels without AIS or with AIS turned off, and of course squalls.  Add into that hourly log entries and there is more than enough to keep one alert.

 

The iPads do not work so well in bright sunshine so during the day it is reading to keep us alert.  And you lot thought that we tied knots, made splices and sang sea shanties.