09:54S 125:47W

Daily run 140 nm

Miles to go 768

 

One of the good things about night watch last night was we didn’t have to get up to see the lunar eclipse....we were up!  It conveniently happened from midnight  to about 2am, overlapping our watches so we both got to see it.  Another yacht told us about it on our morning SSB net and a quick scan of the Nautical Almanac revealed the exact time.   David saw the start of it, as the earth’s shadow began to pass over the moon and  I came up on watch to see the moon fully eclipsed and watched as the earth’s shadow gradually move off.  It was a good way to kill some time as a six hour watch can drag if you let it.   We have various ways to get through it – for a start we try to carry out normal routine, whether that’s writing emails, updating the blog, navigating, doing crosswords and sudoku or reading.   Watching the lunar eclipse was a bonus. All of this activity is of course interrupted every 10 mins to do a thorough scan of the horizon with the naked eye and binoculars and we have alarms set on our AIS which alerts us to any ships in the vicinity. 

 

When the weather is calm, the night is starry and there is a moon, it’s lovely to sit in the cockpit and soak it all up – sometimes we may even hand steer to pass the time. Sometimes we listen to music but there’s only so many times you can hear Southern Cross by Crosby, Stills and Nash (actually, I prefer the Jimmy buffet version but David votes for the original). We have a huge variety of music on ipod but somehow, after two weeks at sea, we feel we’ve heard them all a million times and it’s often just nice to listen to the sounds of the ocean.

 

The first 10 days of the passage were too rough to do much other than huddle under the dodger, but the past few nights have been just magical, with the full moon to guide us.  To help us through night watch we make a concerted effort not to talk about our tiredness...tiredness is after all a state of mind and the more you talk about it the more you believe it. 

 

One thing that fascinated us in the Caribbean was watching the space station go overhead.  We stumbled across the NASA website that gives dates and times and had several wonderful viewings – once on a remote beach away from all bright lights and several times from Bandit.   The website gives the time and position the space station will appear on the horizon and how long it will be visible – it’s quite astonishing to see how big and how fast it is.   We didn’t think to look up the times before we left so if anyone finds the website and times applicable for where we are (nearing the Marquesas) we’d appreciate it.  You can email us with details yachtbandit {CHANGE TO AT} mailasail {DOT} com

 

We normally see lots of shooting stars but have only seen the odd one this trip.  On one Atlantic crossing we did, in 2004, there were so many shooting stars it was like a fireworks show and they were at times so bright they lit up the cockpit. We learnt later it was a meteorite shower.

 

We’re counting down the days (and night watches) now.  We know that when we do arrive in Fatu Hiva and drop anchor we will have the sleep of our lives.