Day 10
1000knights
Sun 29 Aug 2010 12:48
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Day 10
We continued our course south tracking the 6degree
west lat. Had a day of beautiful weather with light NE winds F3-4
throughout most of the day. Sea conditions gradually settled and we've now
had 24+hrs of calm, flat seas providing delightful conditions, even if the price
is to motorsail. As at 13:00 on day 11 we've done 320nm.
Trouble with iridium drop outs and the poor
ssb and navtex receptions meant that we were largely in the dark about the
finisterre low forecast to come in monday and move into the rest of
biscay. This kept us on our southerly heading and destination gijon, not
coruna. In the midst of our efforts to unravel the latest outlook, Fi
bravely stepped into the breech fielding a phone call from simon who took her to
the weatheronline web site and the peak gusts section while the
two worked to unravel whether the charts we'd downloaded the prior day
had or had not changed. If dear old Cheltenham was listening in
for poss terrorist plots they may well have imagined chicanery and a new
cypher in action. Well done and thanks Fi.
Later that night we managed to get back to
mailasail and more importantly as they'd deleted a backlog of bandwidth heavy
weather charts (beyond iridium's dismal caapability) we were able to get the
latest uk and french forecasts. Outlook much better (so long as we ignore
danielle for time being). It appears the low is filling and may not hit us
with gales allowing us to contemplate vivero instead of gijon as our
destination.
A port is an important aim in the next 24
hrs as water supplies are low and our water maker has decided to tell us a
little late in the day that it's not happy with its fan belt installation.
We've also discovered that any movement to tighten
the belt horizontally brings it into contact with our volvo
alternator. Vertical movement is the only short term option and that
requires sheaves and tools that we don't have, plus the risk of
putting our engine out of commission which is not something we favour right
now.
Still numerous porpoise/dolphins tracking our
course which, along with a sailing vessel we encountered on a reciprocal
heading last night, have been pretty much our only points of contact
for some 24 hrs.
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