Restless Atlantic Report 5
Restless of Auckland
Roland and Consie Lennox-King
Sat 19 May 2007 04:24
Hello again from the middle of the
Atlantic!
We're currently at 38"52'N and 47"12'W, travelling in
a North Easterly direction at 6 knots with 15 knots of breeze from the South
East.
Now, Olivia has requested that I make this posting
with a little more information for our followers but I've decided that firstly
you probably don't want to be bored with every detail of every wind shift and
every log that drifts past. Also to be honest there aren't that many logs drifting past so there's
actually not a lot to write about, but I will try make it a little bit more
entertaining for you.
Well we broke the 1000 nautical mile mark
from Bermuda last night and have had this 15-20 knot breeze for the past 12 or 14
hours. The wind is starting to veer so we
have gone from a course of 20 degrees to 60, and want a course of 90.
Moni (our windvane self steering gem) has been taking care of the helm
since the wind picked up yesterday evening and doing a mighty fine job I must
say. A little uncomfortable last night and Roland resorted to sleeping on the
floor in the hall as he was often finding himself airborne
in his cabin! (usually Gilbert's sleeping
spot as his soggy cabin either has a major leakage problem or he has a major
medical problem).
Yesterday and Wednesday, after the 35 knot winds
died off we had a range of about 2-5 knots of wind (although still about 4-6
feet of swell) We spent about 36 hours motoring with blue skies and dieing
swells and managed to get a swim in the crystal clear 4500 feet deep blue water
and another shampoo on the stern. We managed to catch up on some sleep and make
some running repairs of sheared bolts on the boom, snapped ties where the barrel
for the windvane attaches to the steering wheel, sewing a ripped stay sail and
fixing a number of blown splices on halyards and sheets.
The fishing hasn't improved much, we managed
to lose another lure on another big strike which also managed to take a lot of
the line from the reel so we're planning to upgrade the nylon in the Azores and
get serious on our way to Ireland. However we have stepped up the attack. We
have a hand line with about 1200lb nylon (from
Reverie) and steel trace set up with a shock chord and I have
engineered a system that raises a flag when we get a strike. Still got high
hopes and will keep you posted on the fishing success! Gilbert has been listening to Spanish lessons on his
Ipod, and I have been learning Mandarin on mine, and everybody has been
reading.
Herb's advice
last night was to get north to get above gale force winds from a low pressure
system below us. So we pushed a few degrees North and the winds will apparently
be turning to the South and stay at about 15-20 knots. Well, that's about
as much as I gathered from Herb's
explanation on our situation. We will check in with him again tonight and see if
we're in better shape.
OK,
well that's about as much as I can think of to bore you at the moment but I
will keep an eye out for drifting logs for my next email to keep you on the
edges of your seats.
We still have 756
miles to go to the Azores, and may get there on Monday or
Tuesday.
Bye for now,
the Crew of
Restless