37:48N 00:11W Position Update
The Snark on The ARC
Ben Little
Fri 8 Jul 2011 02:12
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Hi there, it's night time blog time
again
We are 11 minutes off the Greenwich Meridian which
I thought was rather West of here but there you go. Only having crossed it
once before by sail (probably in my sleep) it is hard to remember. Indeed
since it is the middle of the night I may sleep through it again, we shall
see!
Motoring into the night again on the second day of
our trip. It is a bit slow right now with a some light wave action slowing
us a little but still making reasonable progress with conservative engine
revs. I got up a little early for this shift and surprised my shipmate
Peter. I was confused at the time thinking it an hour later than it
was. I am unsure whether this means I have to do an extra hour of watch,
if this is what Peter thinks then I will have to wake him as I am consequently
more tired than usual tonight.
It has been an interesting sailing day with quite a
lot of wind, up to 20 knots at times (though very variable) giving a very
helpful broad reach taking the sting out of the wind speed. With our
handicapped rig I am glad it did not get up any stronger but all seemed
very solid and there was no movement in the damaged spreaders, anyway another
useful rest for the engine. As usual our grib forecasts have been
very accurate except where influenced by land effects which were noticeable off
the Spanish coast. Now in more or less open water we only have the Grib
wind to deal with and that has dropped away to be no help at all. Well we
have plenty of fuel and we are a bit ahead of schedule for a 3 day trip which
will have us there on Saturday morning. It is all an improvement from the
forecast a few days ago which was basically the flat calm we started with for
the whole trip.
Tonight we are passing through jelly fish swarms
and chewing up a few which makes for some interesting bio-luminescence. At
one stage the engine revs faltered and I am putting it down to very heavy jelly
fish action on the prop rather than dirty fuel filters but I will have a check
when it gets light. Thankfully that is the only light out there now.
Earlier on we had a lot of traffic along the Spanish coast. All behaving
itself today and moving in straight lines unlike the ships inside the med as we
left Gibraltar which were constantly changing course. I guess they are
just in station keeping mode but sometimes as we drew near
they "coincidentally" started to move in odd directions.
Hopefully by next entry we will have passed
Ibiza and will be well on the way transiting to Palma Mallorca
currently around 165 Miles away
Ben and the Crew of The Snark
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