Saturday 7th March
Exocet Strike
John & Stella Dyer
Sun 8 Mar 2015 05:23
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Busy day today as the SSB Net controller. The SSB
is a radio, very similar to a ham amateur radio, whereby you can transmit over
vast distances with a relatively simple piece of kit. It was until satellite
comms the only way ships could remain in contact, ditto for aircraft. Its use
has fallen a lot now for commercial use but for us yachties its a great way to
keep in daily touch. We have a morning and evening roll call, position and wind
stregth and directin plus any other useful info.
Plus it was getting much windier today often 25 to
30 kn, so we put in a second reef, no change in boat speed but much more
comfortable. The seas were getting bigger and often beam on, not a great angle,
but now its getting better. Plenty of squalls today as well, and we broke the
Duogen again. This is a great machine that we tow just behind the boat and we
get a lot of electric power to charge our batteries, I suspect I had the wrong
propellor on,for lower speeds and as we were hitting 10 kn regularly the
deliberate weak link broke. \got spares, but only a couple, best order some
more.
Too fast for fishing,maybe tomorrow.
John
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