Blog date 28-11-2014
Exocet Strike
John & Stella Dyer
Fri 28 Nov 2014 22:40
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Hello is there anybody there. Yesterday was quite a
day, started in a grey and cool for this far south day, with 20 - 25 knots of
wind and big seas, 3 metres at least, makes the boat like a big washing machine.
Forecast was o go down but it was still the same overnigh, think we all
struggled to sleep. I moved some sails and slept in one of the forward pilot
berth cabins and slept better that way. We saw a pod of dolphins approaching the
boat through some waves, quite unreal to see these brown shapes and then pop out
of the waves, surfing. We thought w saw one jump, then realised it was a 2
to 3 foot Tuna jumping to keep away from the dolphins - it lost.
Today has seen a marked improvement winds are down
and the swell is down so our conditions on board are much improved.
its great to have an SSB radio and a radio net to
talk over, makes you relaise there are others doing the same. There are three
boats we are regularly inb contact with, Hobnob, an American we met in
Lanzarote, he is currently in La Gomera about to set sail across next week,
Wild Goose, another american who is approx 250 miles west of us and Moody
Mistress a Canadian boat currentl aprox 200 mile north of us. For
anyone who doesnt know about communications at sea, there is the VHF radio,
good for line of sight comms, ie max 20 to 40 miles, then comes SSB which can
communicate globally - like ham radio on land. it g=can take some gettingnused
to soimetimes its very garbled and there is a lot of mistique, but actually it
works really well and lots of trans ocean sailors use it via a net of
predeterminded times and frequencies. Before Sat comms it was the only way. /now
you can send and recieve emails via it with the rih=ght kit, and its free.
However we also have a sat phone, Iridium, ii works well but only for
short emails, no surfing, connection speed is only approx 6kbs, just think how
slow this is, dial up internet was 56kbs, ie 8 times faster and look how slow we
thought that was. so no internt surfing or social media. dont even know whats
happening in the world, oh except thatLewis Hamilton won the World Championship,
thaks for the update Andrew.
timr to go folks.John. Position 1650N
3152W
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