Second night under the stars on route to the Canaries 34:09.18N 08:16.95N
The Snark on The ARC
Ben Little
Fri 13 Nov 2009 01:19
|
Hi folks,
It is our second night under the stars off the
coast of Africa on our way to Las Palmas, sadly I have no fish pictures to send
out despite new lures, a filleting knife and indeed a sushi knife, wasabi and
ginger (courtesy of Dug). It seems a lot warmer or it may be that the wind
is at our backs rather than in our face, and that I have just been
re-arranging the Spinnaker, and applying tape to a tiny tear near the
clew. We had our big yellow spinnaker flying for around 6 hours today
but vary variable winds which seemed to be disappearing made us take it down
around 10pm last night. The wind does however seem to be
returning and we shall try and give the engine a rest again if it keeps
up.
While we had some good sailing it has not been
especially fast as the winds have been quite slight, I suppose it is a good
intro to the boat for Dugald and continues to be comfortable conditions for
Chris but does not really show what we can do speed wise. I would like
another 5 Knots or so of wind which would shave a day off out total transit
time. Right now it looks like that will be 5 days if we carry on at our
current speed which is averaging 6 Knots under a combination of engine and
sails. Sadly there has been too little wind to rely solely on that if we
want to give ourselves some prep time in Gran Canaria.
I think Dugald's dependence on Stugeron (sea
sickness tablets) is making it quite tough on him to stay awake at times,
on Wednesday he went to bed very early after the travel day and slept like a
stone and yesterday he passed out straight after dinner. This has I guess
2 positive effects, he is fresh as a daisy in the morning and perhaps more
importantly we don't have to dodge his runs to the guard rail when he chucks his
guts up (not a pretty sight). I do remember another time when sailing in
San Francisco when another friend of mine honked up over the side, much to my
amusement he did so into the prevailing wind which blew it straight back on boat
the boat, over his head and into the face of the hapless skipper (both parties
names withheld to protect the innocent). Thankfully we are barf free on
this trip so far.
The sleeping arrangements seem to be working out
fine as with someone on watch there is always a room free which avoids all the
snoring complaints the next day. Three crew is working out much less hard
work than 2 and in theory you can get a pretty much uninterrupted night unless
you pick the 1 till 4am watch as I have tonight. I think it will work
better if we designate who relieves the last night watch in the morning and who
is responsible before the official bed time watch begins so we may need 2 short
watches either side of the currently designated 9 hours of night watch patterns
or I guess we could go to 4 hour watches to give a full 12 hour coverage, I can
discuss with the guys in the morning.
We appear to be all tooled up for the ARC including
all the safety gear checks. I have no doubt they will find something out of
order but I do hope now after all the efforts we will meet all the requirements
and any add ons will be minor and easy to comply with, we even have spare life
jacket whistles which apparently are like hens teeth in Gran Canaria. We
have a few questions such as what is the best position for stowage of flares as
both the best near helm station locations are either adjacent to the gas locker
or near where I keep the spare fuel for the outboard. I guess I could move
the fuel or get rid of it but it is a handy location for both!
Tonight will be the acid test but I think we have
shaken out the gremlins from the sat phone and we have not suffered any
catastrophic errors. The mail compression software seems to work very
well sending messages but quite often seems to take some time to download
things even when there is very little else (or nothing) using the
bandwidth. I also made a successful call home last evening which
proves the sat phone works well on voice as well as data. Our other communications option the VHF rather than being quite
out of sight of land is full of useless chatter and even music on Channel
16. Other Snark crew will recall the Monkey overboard announcements off
Corfu and out of tune singing, this time folk are playing music, having long
conversations (clearly of a non urgent nature) in Chinese and Tagalog, quite
frustrating for anyone needing the channel for real and worse for some reason
the nonsense broadcasts seem to come with some form of booster power and even on
the lowest volume setting are likely to awake the off watch crew (except of
course for Dugald's drug induced beauty sleep.
I will sign off now.
Feel free to send us some e-mail messages at thesnark {CHANGE TO AT} mailasail {DOT} com, So far
there has been only one. Just don't send us any photo's or video clips
that will block up the sat phone.
|