Fai Tira blog Tuesday 4th Jan 2011  

Bay of Bengal 07:24.47N 091:50.79E

Following the New Year’s fantastic celebrations in Patong, we decided to leave at about 11.00am on New Year’s Day, with David and Valerie on Angel closely followed by Chisl, Lucy Alice and Jacabel. The morning sunrise had provided some wind at last and we headed away from Thailand en route to Sri Lanka 1100 miles to the west.   

Although the forecast and GRIB files showed that we were likely to get light winds, we started off in quite strong winds that were being generated by the effect of the land mass we were just leaving.  After a few hours the winds decreased and settled down to a constant 10 to 15 knots coming over our stern.  The seas were unsettled and our first night was really rather uncomfortable as Fai Tira rocked and rolled. 

The next morning the wind swung around to the ESE which gave us the perfect sailing angle with our usual downwind sail plan. This consists of ‘poleing out’ the Genoa to windward (on a pole, to make it stick out more sideways!), having the Mainsail to leeward and the Staysail to leeward also. The effect of the wind blowing down the Genoa from the Leech (back or trailing edge) to the Luff (front or leading edge) accelerates the wind over the Staysail and Mainsail, giving us our best speeds.  I learnt about this technique whist sailing Enterprise dinghies with one of my old bosses, John Poulson, whilst representing BT in sailing competitions. We have sailed with this sail plan since leaving Phuket, except for having to change a couple of times due to squalls coming though.  It’s worked very well hitherto.

We settled into our routine of watches which consists of the following:  during the day we have informal watches unless it is deemed necessary to instigate formal watches, due, say, to bad weather/sea conditions or heavy rain. During the night we do 2 hours on/4 hours off, starting at 8.00pm. We rotate this each night so that we all have a go at each watch throughout the journey, until 8.00am when the informal regime starts again.  During the day we read books, write our logs, listen to iPods and occasionally do any necessary jobs on the boat’s fabric.  We watch for other boats, fishing nets, crab pots, any floating hazards (e.g containers, tree trunks and the like!), dolphins and whales. We have seen lots of dolphins so far on this voyage.

We have a daily radio net scheduled at 10.00am local time with the other BWR boats, when we pass any urgent messages and our positions together with weather information to a Net Controller (one for each day of the week), who then emails the information back to rally control. He or she then declares the net “open for chat”. This is the opportunity to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances on other boats and pass “the time of day”.  At 6.00pm we have a listening watch and the Net Controller passes any messages to the fleet. We then have the net open for more chat.

We now have less than 700 miles to travel to Galle in Sri Lanka and hope to be there on Sunday or Monday next, in time for my birthday (11^th) and to meet up with my not-so-old friends Steve and Maureen.  We hope to update the blog again before then.

We hope you all had a great New Year’s Eve and that you keep to your resolutions!