Training for home waters

NORDLYS
David and Annette Ridout
Wed 13 May 2009 13:14
Training for home Waters?
 
38:32N  36:57W
13th May 2009
 
For the last sixteen hours we have been motoring over a relatively calm sea the greyness of which has merged into the greyness of the sky.  Cloud base has been around five hundred feet at best and the moments of good visibility have been interspersed with regular periods of heavy drizzle.  Training for UK waters?
 
The whole boat is damp as the relative humidity is high and it is impossible not to bring damp clothes down below.  This has been somewhat helped by the heat given off by the engine.  Just to think that it was only a month or so ago that we dreaded the engine casing getting hot.  Now we long for it.
 
Nevertheless morale is good.  When we turned the engine off this morning for our radio schedule the wind filled in slightly from the SW, where we have been expecting it from, and we are now sailing on a broad reach before ten knots of wind.  Doing a stately 5.5 knots through the water we are being helped by nearly a knot of current as we have been all night.  Pre GPS sailors never really knew what the current was doing but one of the few downsides of the GPS combined with an accurate log is to tell you whether you are being helped or hindered.  For many this is a big plus of course but for the passagemaker long periods of the latter are very morale sapping.
 
The forecast, silly boy that I am to ever believe them, is for this wind to build and to whisk us the final 273 miles to Flores.  Or as Tennyson puts it  'At Flores in the Azores where Sir Richard Grenville lay...' one of the bits of poetry that every school boy knows.  It tells us of the battle between the Revenge and a large Spanish squadron.
 
I must go, sunshine is coming in through the cabin windows.  I want to see what it is like plus an excited mate has called to say she can see white horses on the surface of the ocean and I note the GPS is showing our speed to be nearly seven knots.
 
Happy times
 
David