the home straight

NORDLYS
David and Annette Ridout
Tue 25 Mar 2008 22:31
The Home Straight
 
7:16S  49:08W
Tuesday 25th March 2008
1630 hrs.
 
Last Sunday, Easter Sunday, morning saw Nordlys hurling herself north westwards with 20/25 knots of wind on the beam and some very rough seas on top of a large swell.  The latter had been forecast by the Brazilian Navy.  Apparently some storm way up north had caused it.  We have subsequently heard that the Virgin Islands had some of the largest swells that they had experienced in fifteen years.  Life on board was fairly basic.  Motion was very jerky and the cockpit was being constantly lightly sprayed so we stayed down below and read, did sudoku and just existed.  There was a heavy overcast and high humidity but the endless rain squalls had stopped and the worst evils of the ITCZ were we felt behind us.  Moral was also boosted by a good knot of current with us.
 
Slowly things improved and this morning the reefs were let go, the genoa fully unfurled and now we have just put up the reacher.  The reason for this rather over energetic action being that the wind has gone down to 15/18 knots and moved slightly aft but more importantly there is a knot and a half of current against us.  We were warned of this by a friend who is a few hundred miles in front of us.  He has also given us the point  at which he came out of this rogue and conditions revert to the expected NW flowing current.  This all probably sounds extremely minor to my readers but after well over two weeks at sea suddenly and unusually for this part of the ocean having your daily runs reduced by over 40 miles is to put it mildly rather annoying.  There I can write without reverting to the word which flows naturally I am afraid in such circumstances!  A German yachtie friend of long experience said to me that looking back on his days of astro navigation he now realises that often when he thought that he had done an inaccurate sight it was not probably the case but was due to an unexpected  current flow.  Certainly modern logs coupled with GPS have shown me that the ocean is full of the most unexpected and often strong current eddies that have little or nothing to do with the various Admiralty current diagrams that the worlds hydrographers put out.
 
So with the sun shining in a cloudless sky we are just 721 miles from Scarborough, Tobago.  Nordlys was last there in 2001 thus technically we will have finished our circumnavigation.  However as far as we are concerned this will occur some time in summer 2009 when she is safely tucked up in her berth in Lymington.  Since she left Scarborough she has been up to the Canadian boarder, crossed the Pacific, explored the islands of that great ocean for two seasons, left Australia to starboard and visited many Indian Ocean anchorages.  All told over 55,000 miles.  She will get a well deserved rest in two weeks in Grenada where we will leave her for the summer. 
 
I will write again with the odd picture when we are at anchor and the keyboard is not jumping around before my eyes as my legs brace themselves to hold me in my seat.  Actually thank goodness they have to do that occasionally as apart from struggling to the top of the steps in St Helena and walking the sand dunes of Ascension island to look at giant turtles they have done little for well over a month now.
 
David