37:48N 00:11W Position Update

The Snark on The ARC
Ben Little
Fri 8 Jul 2011 02:12
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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