Half way
Around the Atlantic: ✔ Next stop: Circumnavigation
Ron Noordhoek
Sun 30 Jan 2022 10:59
15:47.703N 042:39.600W
We’re officially halfway now, 993 Nm to go still. The other day we damaged the spinaker and we had to take it down. We motored during the day but then the wind picked up a bit and since then we’re running on the genoa. 20-25 kts winds and 5.5 kts on average SOG. That’s really nice and although we lost some miles when motoring, we wouldn’t have flown the spinaker over 12 kts AWS anyway. So it doesn’t affect us that much.
We’ll have a halfway party around noon. I brought a bottle of champagne and Nicole is cocking the rice for sushi. We still have some mahi we caught the first day but we do hope to catch a tuna this morning. That would be really great :-)
We’re having a great time. The sail has been fantastic so far and we all enjoy it very much.
I managed to take some pictures of the stars during my watch the other night. They are so bright that even with my phone and some adjustments of brightness and the like, they came out very nice :-)
When I came on deck for my morning shift a couple of days back, I noticed something what looked like a big wave crushing. But then a big dark object came out of the water and disappeared again with a big splash. It was a whale! I called out to Nicole who was on the front deck and then it came out the water again and again. She went to get John but unfortunately it had disappeared.
It was to far away to have a good look at it but, the next day Ian saw noticed a geiser and shouted ‘whale’. Next moment it came out of the water totally just 30m ahead of us!!
Unfortunately this time I was down below that moment and when I got on deck it didn’t show itself anymore -:(
I did see the turtle though. We almost overrun it. It was looking up from the water and with one flipper seemed to wave at us, or maybe just tell us to get lost :-/
Every morning we have to clean the decks from at least a half a dozen flying fish. A couple of times I could rescue one when I heard it flapping on the deck and last night on woke me up flapping on the deck just over my head. It didn’t stop so I got out and tossed it back in the water.