POSITION REPORT ON MONDAY 20 JULY 2015

The Alba Chronicles
Neville Howarth
Sun 19 Jul 2015 21:27

POSITION REPORT ON MONDAY 20 JULY 2015 AT 0800

 

10:07S   147:22E

 

So far we've done 325 miles with 45 miles to go. We did 170 miles in the past 24 hours – our best daily run in four years of living aboard.  We’ve got 100% cloud cover, with 20-25 knot SSE wind, hammering along at 6-8 knots, so we will be in Port Moresby this afternoon. Here's what we did yesterday and overnight.

 

19 July 2015  Panasia to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (Day 2)

There wasn’t really a sunrise, just a gradual lessening of the darkness to give us a very grey morning with overcast skies.  After I’d uploaded our passage blog posting and downloaded the weather, Glenys went to bed and left me to cope with the squalls that caught us up every hour - in some the wind picked up from 20 knots to 30 knots with heavy rain and others just gave us rain.

 

It cleared up in the afternoon, but the wind picked up a little to 20-25 knots and we had 3 metre waves making it a boisterous ride. 

 

There’s quite a lot of shipping that is following our route, so we’ve been monitoring the AIS, which certainly makes our lives easier. Without AIS, when we spotted a ship, we’d have to figure out whether it was a danger to us.  With AIS, we look on our chart plotter and it tells us the name of the ship, course, speed and Closest Point of Approach (CPA).   If we’re not happy, we can call the ship up by name and discuss a plan of action.

 

Just before dark, I rigged up our spinnaker pole to port in anticipation of turning more downwind as we follow the coast line.  It was a wild night.  The wind wasn’t too bad at 25-30 knots, but the waves were large and steep making the boat slew around and surf up to 10 knots.  It was hard to relax when on-watch and very hard to sleep when off-watch.