North of Fortleza
ratCATcher
Andre and Alison Stroebel
Sat 30 Jul 2011 13:08
30th July 2011
At present we are 90nm north of Fortaleza.
As the sunset last night we believed we were in for a rough night of squalls and high seas, however fairly soon after dark it settled to a more constant flow with only the occasional squall which virtually disappeared at about 03h00.
As Andre took over the midnight watch, he had just settled himself in the helm seat with his coffee and cookies when a huge wave dumped about 3 bucketfuls of water right on top of him swamping the cockpit and spilling into the saloon. He still can't figure out exactly where it came from but seemed to appear over the port side. Highly pissed off he ate his salted oats cookies and drank his salty coffee while swearing at Neptune!
This day broke with clear skies and sunshine.
We and Yacht Iza swap and plot each others position every 3 hours and this morning Nicci and I had fun trying to work out if a huge cargo ship passing to starboard was towing his mooring dock or was pretending not to be sailing as his AIS status showed he was still on his mooring but traveling at 13.9 knots per hour. Nicci contacted him for a weather report and got a garbled report about if we wanted to know where he was. :) We decided he was doing one of those if I don't look at them they can't see me moves as he seemed totally unaware of the fact we were watching him pass!
We are now sailing West parallel with the coast. The current of between 2 and 3 knots flowing with us. If we maintain this speed we should reach Trinidad on the 9th August but we still have to go through the doldrums at the equator so this might change. (We are eating our oranges just in case of the dreaded scurvy)!!!!!!!
We have all put beers in the fridge in anticipation of crossing the Equator. More news tomorrow.
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