Day 13
Zahara: The story so far......
Ron Dunn
Sat 5 Dec 2009 12:12
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Hi All,
Greetings from mid Atlantic..... We are now just
about as far from land as we'll get on this passage. About 900nm from the Cape
Verdi islands and also French Guiana and over 1,000nm to Barbados. St Lucia
is now down to near 1200nm. It does feel really remote out here now. We haven't
seen a ship for about 5 days and no yachts for 2. I'm a little
surprised at the lack of marine life as well with Dolphins only appearing
once, no Whales (managed to spell correctly this time!). I caught a couple of
fish and saw one large fish jump out of the water this morning and that's about
it. I thought something large hit the keel this morning but it may just
have been a wave. There have been reports of yachts beiing damaged and even sunk
by Whales so, whilst it would be nice to see one, perhaps not too close
up!
The weather continues to be very kind
with constant 'Trades' of around F4 or F5 and seas around 2m. This means good progress without the worry of
straining 'Zahara' too much. My mindset is now more towards not breaking
the boat rather than trying to sqeeze the last knot out of her. So
It's a matter of optomising the sail plan for the conditions. (Technical
note.....A boat has a 'hull speed' when in normal displacement mode.
This is a function of the waterline length and at that speed, the
boat sits in its own wave with crests at each end. The amount of energy
needed to break out of that would be very large so adding extra sail won't cut
it unless it initiates 'planing' or 'surfing'. All it would do is to add
more loading on the hull and rigging. True, we are very competative and
there are boats we would very much like to beat, especially the, other two
,small boats in the fleet, 'Cantare' (who we have a small wager with) and
'Ranja' but, common sense must prevail and, at the end of the day,
It's a small cruising boat in a very big ocean. Getting there is what it is
all about......
Hopefully now Larry has aquired a tan, we may
be able to get a couple of pics on the 'blog' soon
,Ron and Larry....
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