Return Leg: Day 7 - Moving on..

Halcyon
Rob Withers
Mon 29 Jun 2015 09:40
Pos: 46:27N 15:10.7W

Things are pretty simple out here. Bobbing around with no boat speed in
a swell is bad. A broad reach at 8kn towards home in the sunshine is
good. That's what we're doing today.

The wind slowly arrived yesterday afternoon. The sea had flattend out
so it only took a little wind, on a fine reach to gether going nicely.
Through the evening the wind filled in and veered, so that by midnight
we were at top speed. James did the 00:00 to 3:00am watch and woke me
to say that we'rd done 9Nm in an hour, but perhaps a reef was a good
idea. As is always the case, it didn't slow us down much - but I think
we won't quite make 100NM made good in 12 hours.

Our watch system is working well. 3 x 4hrs in the day, 4 x 3hrs at
night. So the watches are:

00:00 - 3:00am
3:00 - 6am
6am - 9am
9am - 1pm
1pm - 5pm
5pm - 9pm
9pm - midnight

This is a slight modification to the pattern we used on the way down to
makle the dawn watch less undesireable.

It's interesting to see the length of day change as we move across the
world. Very roughly, sunset has been at about 10:00pm everyday, but
the sunrise got later by about 20 mins per day as we headed towards the
Azores - and of course the reverse now. As we've come north the shorts
have gone away and the thermals needed at night - so shorter nights is
good payback.

Rob
pp James