Saturday 1 December 2018
Kelpie
Sarah and David Holtby
Sat 1 Dec 2018 17:30
Noon to noon run: 152 miles. Our wake from Mindelo is now 900 miles long, leaving 1300 miles to St Vincent. Fish remain a theme, including a large flying one that walloped into the sprayhood last night, alarming Sarah and David. We are a long way from land but still seeing sea birds, and indeed a novel one just circled us that looked like a parakeet but pure white, with a thin tail as long as its body and the appearance of being lost.
We however are not lost, being within a whisker of our great circle course after instincts to resume a comfortable and fast broad reach at dusk and then a dead run at noon both proved highly profitable. The relative lack of repairs, sail changes and television has allowed us to deploy the skipper's O Level trigonometry into an iPad program by which we assess the Velocity Made Good consequences of current and prospective courses and post rationalise our hunches: great fun and so far surprisingly accurate. A CoSine is apparently the operative bit of maths. A VeeSine is also handy, for communicating down the length of the boat if sail changes are fraught, but that is not maths.
Even more fun is another new program to calculate our race position adjusted for Time Correction Factors. TCFs are the yachting community's way of making people who spend disproportionately vast amounts of money on big boats regret deeply that they have. Sailing with a Discovery 55, for example (yours for seven figures), we find that our monohull rally position improves from fourth place to second, ahead of them. But it's a long way to go.
Rollin' Like Rawhide
The Kelpie Crew