North Easterly or NORTH Easterly

Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Sat 28 Nov 2009 05:17
On the night watch again. It is a beautiful night with a waxing moon and very little cloud in an otherwise starry sky. We are at position 17:16.57N 043:05.69W at 0200 ships time. To keep ships time we have been altering (back) our watches and the ships clock each day by 20 minutes. The theory here was that it should take us about 15 days to cross the Atlantic and we would hope to arrive at a time zone (Antigua) which would be 5 hours behind UTC - previously known as Greenwich Meant Time. However as we have been gybing the whole trip we will do at least 25% but probably nearer 30% more than the straight line distance to Cape Verde from Gran Canaria and Gran Canaria to Antigua and the passage will take us at least 18 days we kept time for three days. This route is the Southern Route and is already the longest in miles of the three recognised routes for this passage so we are going to be sailing a hell of a lot of miles - more than 3,500 for this crossing alone. I also expect if we make safe landfall in Antigua that we will have sailed Rhiann Marie close to 6000 miles in the past three months. Considering she is a new boat and loaded with systems and equipment we have remarkably few problems - yet! We hope by mid day Saturday to have only 1000 miles left to run.
 
We are still consistently plugging in the 200 mile plus days with seven in a row now, 1541 miles in seven days. There have been four hour watches where 40 miles has been covered for the watch and 230 miles is our best day. We are going for ten 200+ 's  in a row, but this will be difficult as the winds are forecast to ease to 10 - 15 knots as opposed to 15 - 20 which we have been having.
 
On night watches or when there is a heavy swell or big motion on the boat we had initially been using Raymarine lifetags with one watch handing over to the other. This is of course in addition to our lifejackets. Our lifejackets are Gael Force Fastnet XTpro which are 150N ( I will have the same model made in 275Newton bouyancy for next year) sprayhoods and crotch straps fitted and with integral harness. They are extremely comfortable and light. We were very disciplined about the lifetag protocol but then we started getting irrregular alarms from them and of course everyone became immune to reacting to the alarms so we reviewed the policy. We now dont use the tags as they are currently unreliable and instead we clip on whenever leaving the cockpit to the helm or any where else, at night and whenever we deem it neessary through the day also.
 
Yesterday Angus, who does crosswords (as well as other things) asked if I knew the name of an inland waterway in the centre of America. At least that is what he thought he asked me. I immediately responded Panama (canal). The question was written name a Central American inland waterway. He read it as being in the centre of America not Central America. I think this phenemonnomanonn?? (its 0230!) explains why the dependable trade winds down here at 17 deg North of  the equator are Easterly. I always understood these winds to be North Easterly. However there are trade winds Noth and South of the equator and perhaps these are the NORTH        "Easterly Trade" winds and the whole thing has been a misunderstanding all along!