32:29N 46:48W at 1115 local = 1415 GMT = 1515BST .
Records continue to tumble on this transat - today is shaping up to be our
slowest ever. BxWx texted that there'd be a "puirple patch" and about eight
seconds later the wind reached 33 knots. This still counts as weather
forecasting, just. So after trying lots of options including running away,
we're grinding straight into the waves, wind and rain at about 3knots but
directly towards our target. Sails down, max wind speed 42 knots in the six
hours or so since daybreak. BxWx aso forecast that this interlude would
clean the decks, and sure enough, quite a bit of the trim around one of the
forward trampolines has been ripped clean away. Small wonder that this
direction is sometimes called the "uphill" route and why lots of boatds
prefer to doodle down to Panama or go almost anywhere from the caribbean,
rather than do a W-E transat. Mindyou, sometimes it's dead calm and the
pilot books tell us to take lots of diesel.
I think it's brightening up though, and Karim is even making bread. But our
ETA in Horta likely very late Tuesday now, or v early Wednesday next week,
especially with the time difference and the fact that our waypoint is 20
miles from Horta itself.
Much calmer day yesterday. Marc found MattD and me sitting about in the
cockpit doing nothing much, and asked if we could possibly help him derive
the Cosine Rule? Hm. Fortunaely, all three of us have engineering degrees
and hence well up for many if not all ridiculous nonsensical make-work
ideas and worthless saddo pastimes, and so we separately all had a crack at
it. Triangles innit, b-squared = a-squared + c-squared - 2ac Cos B on *any*
triangle in case you've forgotten Not too bad, (one way is to use the
equality of the perpendicular from A to side c, I can't believe we did
this .) and then Marc announced that he planned to use this plus liberal use
of derivatives to calculate Great Circle distances. Obviously, he's got
nowhere much further than Cosine Rule and I reckon it's summink to do with
Conics, a bit. Does anyone have a handy (probly massive and complicated )
formula for the Great Circle distance between two points on the globe each
defined as lat:long that would help him out. Yeah, the GPS will do it, but
that's far to easy for Marc. Engineer, see? So unless we get him a formula
soonish, well, he's likely to try dismantle the chartplotter soonish.
Someone has asked about what food we make which I will try answer tomorrow
in hopefully calmer conditions. Oh, and a friend (aslo called Matt) has
finally sent us some jokes...
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