02.03.2015

Gryphon II is still carrying us across the South Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean and today we are the closest we have been to a mainland for some weeks. We are just 279 miles from Cabo de Sao Roca, the rocky cape at the north east corner of Brazil with outlying islands even nearer to us. Sierra Leone is our nearest African country but that is over 1,300 miles away. We won't be stopping in Brazil, it is the most expensive country in the world to take a yacht. For the small islands off the Cabo, the Arquipelago de Fernando Noronha, this time last year it cost 82$ U.S for each day of anchoring (not moorings) plus 20$ per person per day for environment preservation tax. Then to visit on an island a permit is required which incurs further charges. The rest of Brazil is similar or worse and our Portuguese isn't too good either so we shall be giving that a miss.

Ascension Island now lies 1165 miles behind us, we have made slower progress than hoped with light winds then the doldrums as well as three quarters of a day lost repairing a rip in the mainsail when thankfully it was calm enough to sit on deck and stitch a repair. It is well patched and hopefully will continue to cope with winds like the 20 knots of NN Easterlies we had for a period later.

We are approaching the equator and the sun is chasing us there. Its declination lessens by about a quarter of a degree each day whilst ours lessens by a bit less than this as our course is much more westerly than northerly. However, we will be at the equator in a day or 2 whereas the equinox, when the sun is there, will not be for another 2 ½ weeks. Hopefully by then we will have arrived somewhere. If we haven't we will have run out of some of the essentials of life such as chocolate and beer together with all those little luxuries like loo rolls, fruit, fresh veg, diesel, gas etc. So with any luck we should be somewhere in the Caribbean by the time the sun catches us up and we can take the classic geography textbook photo of the palm trees standing on their own shadows at mid-day.