Day 2 - Morning from Calypso

Calypso's Web Diary
Joe Drury
Thu 28 Apr 2011 08:40

49:44.15N 5:59.24W

We had a good night, despite the lack of wind, however, Alex woke me for my 6am watch with news of 10 knots of wind coming in from astern: Spinnaker-hoisting time for me, immediate bed for her.

Unfortunately I was groggy so I put the wrong spinnaker up, no mean feat when you have to clip on and guide your tether around the many myriad snags on deck, all in vain as the wind was not coming in from our port quarter as I thought, but straight from astern. So down it came, half went in the sea, and up went the symmetric spinny with a great deal of swearing. All well for about 20 minutes then the wind died to around 5 knots again. More swearing.

It’s worth mentioning that after reading Alex’s log entries, she seems to have been thrown in at the deep end with the graveyard shift - slatting slack sails to deal with, and more huge tankers bearing down on us than I’ve ever had to deal with in a 3 hour watch.. All this whilst I was blissfully zedding. Poor thing is on the last knockings of her emergency energy so I decided to leave her in bed until 1000.

Volts are low, our windmill doesn’t seem to be as efficient as I thought it would be, so the hammering of our engine is keeping us company for now. Things like the radar, autohelm and the fridge gobble up the juice faster than we can generate it, not what I had in mind. Anyhow, the miles are nudging the 100 mark now, so a 5th of the way there. We have finally lost sight of land, the last glimpse was of Wolf Rock, off Land’s End.

A bit of a setback last night was the crew’s entertainment, we had planned for 1 DVD per night, last night was an Alex favourite - Doris Day’s Pillow Talk... we checked the AIS, the radar and the horizon and then settled in for a snuggle and a cup of tea, however we soon realised that there is no DVD player on my PC!! Alex’s face fell. Oh well, good old paperbacks will have to do, that and Scrabble.

The simple goals for today are to get 120 miles out of Callie, keep her tidy and running smoothly. A big thank you goes out to our friend Jon Frary for his kind email with weather information, keep em coming Jon. There seems to be a depression forming out in the Atlantic, if we can ride the high pressure towards it, it will bring us home, although we may have to deal with some unpleasant seas and winds when it hits. More info when I have it.

Right, signing off now, I have to go and take a pee, not easy in a boat that is heaving and racking all over the place! Next blog will be from the First Officer, when she wakes...