Night watch "49:24.49N 10:00.00W"
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Thu 23 Sep 2010 02:32
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I'm writing this at 0300BST having just come off
the midnight watch. We turned south twelve hours ago and so far our weather
routeing strategy is working fine - we are steering straight for Madeira with a
nice F5 wind from the west. Only two tacks since we left Pwllheli.
The moon is full, accompanied by Jupiter to its
left, and the scene on deck has been just magical. The moonlight would have been
bright enough to read a paper by in my younger days, and whole sea around
us is a mixture of silver and black. Every now and then a dolphin jumps out of
the water near the boat (they are attracted to us, to play in the bow wave when
as now we're going fast), sometimes giving me a fright, especially if they
snort a breath loudly right next to me.
The ship is running on BST for the present as we
are heading more or less due south. We did discuss changing to UT
(Universal Time, effectively the same as what used to be GMT) to ease some of
our nautical calculations but Ian pooh-poohed this claiming that with his
experience he would not become confused - and promptly proved that even with his
experience it's very easy to confuse BST with UT. I did the same a couple of
hours later by arranging for Ian to get out of bed an hour too early for a
weather broadcast. I think we've got it sorted now - but it will get more
complicated as we eventually go west; clocks go back an hour for every
15 degrees of longitude. I dare say we will get confused
again.
Still in Irish waters but approaching the
Continental Shelf when the sea depth goes from about 300m to 3000m in just
a couple of miles - then it's just a short hop of 400 miles or so until we're
over Biscay and off the Spanish coast.
Hope to load a picture later today. Watch this
space!
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