Time..
ChilliOyster
Dave & Becky Werrett
Thu 4 Dec 2008 23:45
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December 4th
Position 14 36N, 38.16W
Long night last night with lots to do. The wind was
freaky, the sails were up the sails were down. One or two little mishaps with
ropes getting tangled but nothing serious. However the shift pattern got
disturbed as everytime we change sails for safety reasons we get everyone up.
Best not to be short handed changing sails. However it settled down during the
day and has blown consistently at 10 to 20knts most of the day, the boat moving
along at 5 to 8knts. Need a good few more days like this to get Dave to his
plane on time. Listening to the fleet daily reports boats have spread out
considerably now, we seem to be about in the middle of the fleet perhaps a
little bit further West and South than most.I get the impression that this is
going to be a fairly slow ARC, with boats doing well by chance as they hit
pockets of wind.
Feels like we are on the down hill run now we are
past half way, ignoring the fact there are still 1400 miles plus to go. The
generator is playing up so Becky is worried about the food in the freezer, so it
may be production cooking in a day or two to preserve what we have. It also
means we cannot run the watermaker but as we have probably as much inside the
boat as outside, secreted everywhere in big plastic bottles and a few hundred
litres in the huge watertank, this is not a problem. Unless of course Indy uses
it all getting the conditioner out of her hair. Need to keep throwing her in the
sea! Cannot rely on catching fish, no bites for the last three days and very few
flying fish on the deck in the morning, maybe we are in a more barren area of
the sea.
Weather is cloudy again today, which is quite a
relief for Molly, but a curse for Becky whose UV resistant skin
refuses to get too much of a tan. The rest of us are browning off nicely.
Time continues to pass quickly and days merge into
nights. We are puzzled now what the local time is. It is not getting dark until
around 8:00pm and not light until 8:30am. So I guess we have moved the
equivalent of two hours west. Of course as we are in our own little world here
it does not matter hugely as long as we all stay on the same time. The other
puzzle we have is the moon, it seems to make brief appearances at random times
of the night and then disappear as rapidly as it appeared. We were used to those
nice big moons that stayed up all night with us over Biscay.
The whales were tremendous yesterday but no
wildlife has put in an appearance today.
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