News from the night watch 24:52,90N 16:46,64W

Shaya Moya
Don & Susan Smyth
Tue 23 Nov 2010 03:37
02.30 I'm on watch standby and Reece is on deck watch. We have just been treated to an aerial display by a large pod of dolphins. One chap jumped so far out of the water he almost hit our Gybe preventer ( for the non yachties this is a piece of rope stopping the boom doing stuff you don't want it too). Sorry no pics.... cos its dark. well its not actually we have a full moon tonight.
We are on a dead run, surfing along at 6.5 knots with a following sea down the West coast of Africa. We were advised to stay a way offshore to avoid being boarded by boats full of migrants, hey we don't want any more do we!. This will explain the "kink" in our track line for anyone following our yellow brick tracker. This course took us further West and positioned us on a bearing of 225 magnetic for the Cape Verde's. (yes I know no one else was going that way as the Skipper and the rest of the crew pointed out) The following day when we received our expert weather briefing, guess what the best corridor for wind was to the Islands? Oh yes. At this stage I would have liked to say it was a perfectly executed plan, in fact I did, the only flaw with this was we were surrounded by yachts who are normally much slower than us (as the skipper and crew pointed out, several times in fact). Un-deterred, I am sure given our expert positioning and constant fiddling with the rig, we will overhaul the others who have risked life and limb and possibly more crew than they intended, by going in shore.
I am intending to give Reece a fishing lesson tomorrow as his previous best is only a 1200 lb Marlin, I am going to show him how to catch big fish.
 
Catch you soon with more nonsense.
Dave