Monday 28th  October 201.  Indian Ocean,  16.18.5S 74.45.2E  

Today's Blog by David (Time zone UTC +6.0; BST +.5.0)

A week since we left Cocos. By historical standards, we have been moving along quite nicely. We passed half way yesterday evening,  at around 20.00 hrs:  1159 miles run in six and a half days = circa 175 miles a day. That is about the speed that we normally use for planning purposes and so was worthy of a celebration. Drinks ail round!  Richard broke out the cigars:

Quite why he did that is hard to fathom. We are behind our schedule:

i)                    We have not had the wind we hoped for; we needed to move nearly as quickly on this leg as we did  from Bali to Cocos.  

ii)                   According to “the Books” and the charts,  there is supposed to be a favourable surface current all the way across this ocean (the ‘South Equatorial Current’)  which is said to flow  up to one knot westerly between 12.5^o and 16.0 ^o South.  We were relying on that to give us the lift to get us to Mauritius on time. In practice, we have been plugging a small adverse current pretty much constantly; that  has slowed us down.

iii)                 There is  a tropical depression – not quite a cyclone, thankfully, - developing about 600 miles to the north west of us -  which will move ahead of us,  out of our way,  but it will leave a 24 hour “hole” in the wind  in front of us. We have light winds in prospect for tomorrow.  

So having been behind our schedule for the first half, if we are to get into Mauritius on Saturday, in time for Richard to catch his flight,  we now need to average 8.5 knots – all day every,  day.  In all the premises, (as they say), unless this favourable current materialises, that is a bit of an ask!  An arrival later on Sunday – quite possibly Monday -  is more likely at the moment. Richard is however taking things in his stride:

‘Richard Head’ relaxing in the cockpit.

Meanwhile life on board continues…………..  A degree of peer pressure has developed in  the  Astronavigation Master Class (stimulated not a little by my last blog) which has seen both Peter and David drawn ineluctably into taking sights themselves. Our assessments of the boat’s position are getting more accurate …. (not hard, I hear you say - Ed) and ……….more timely. For example,  I managed finish plotting Sunday’s dawn star sight by Monday lunchtime. In other words, by lunchtime today we established where it was that we, quite possibly, were at dawn yesterday morning.  And by mid-afternoon, Richard had worked out where we might have been at 20.00 last night! 

The good news is that, with the star sights at least, we are now getting tolerably good precision – a matter of a few miles in an Ocean is adequate enough and our estimates of latitude at the Midday Sun sight have been within a mile or so.  That is not to say that we can declare victory  - nor  are we going to chuck the GPS overboard – we will need it as we get close to land!

The Culinary rivalry continues. The ‘simple wrap lunch’ lasted only two days before Richard made bread rolls yesterday morning. Lunch was served thus:

Finally, a wild life note.   On Saturday, before we realised it,  we had sailed within about 30 - 40  metres of what we think was a female Sperm Whale – perhaps 10 metres long. She was clearly pleased to see us as you can tell!

And then she was gone – she hightailed it out of there! (Sorry!)