Day 11 : 17.26N 42.12W

Elixir - Ovni
Richard Merrick
Thu 3 Dec 2009 10:21
Several of our British blog followers had noticed and complained that the blog was late yesterday, my apologies as we got caught up in the moment somewhat and blogging got waylayed and as our clock is winding back more and more each day the time difference between us and the UK is growing.
 
Last night as we were preparing Elixir for the night watch by taking the spinaker down, assessing the winds to make sure the sail settings will get us through a relatively trouble free evening and having our crew cup of tea, we got caught up in the magnificence of the full moon as it rose over the horizon. It was so bright that we could see beams of light stretch accross the ocean when it went behind clouds and it was quite possible to read a book in the cockpit under moonlight.
 
As we scrambled to take photos we noticed a great breathing noise that you would expect from a whale and started looking around to what we could see. Eventually we started to notice that there were two beautiful and huge whales swimming with us. It was really great, they seemed curious and were happy to spend a good couple of hours happily swimming around Elixir and investigating. At one stage as a huge wave built up behind the boat and was well over our head, one of the whales surfaced within it and we could almost reach out and touch it, although we clearly value our arms too much to do that. There is some debate onboard as to what type of whales they were, our skipper suggests that they were Pilot Whales while the rest of us are settling for big ones as we don't know any better.
 
Brilliant.
 
Elixir continues to look after us well.