Good progress but grey day 62:20N 36:36W
Millybrown
Mark Hillmann
Thu 31 Jul 2008 15:03
|
This morning's excitement was a pod of pilot
whales. Note how confidently we identify them: But you are in no
position to contradict. About eight of them came and played in the
waves astern. They may have played under the bows as well, but we missed
that. Perhaps they liked the music we had
on. (Arcade Fire)
Our new confidence is after going to a natural
history museum in Iceland, where we decided that the whales initially
identified as right whales (or bowheads which are greenland right whales)
were probably humpbacks. The photo in our comprehensive whale book is
misleading for humpbacks, what you see from a yacht (a black
shape) is different to the mottled underwater photo they give.
So that is dolphins, porpoises, fin whales,
humpbacks, minkes and pilot whales; but we have been at sea two and a
half months.
Today we are paying for two days of sunshine:
Low cloud, occasional drizzle and spray has brought the visibility down to
perhaps a mile. The water temperature has not dropped yet, so we are still
in the gulf stream. It is the colder East Greenland Current nearer the
shore that brings ice south.
There were icebergs reported 3 days ago as 50
miles away. They are missing from the current reports so have
probably gone.
200 miles ahead there are ones both sides of our
route. They are probably from land glaciers rather than from sea
ice from further north.
We do open the hatch and put a head out and
look round pretty frequently. The genoa has 6 rolls in it so you can see
under it easily, I used to call it the "Scottish rock spotting"
arrangement, but an "iceberg reef" sounds more technical. At least
with icebergs you only have to look ahead, they should not creep up astern like
ferries and container ships.
Six or seven knots all the time, good going really
and I am hungry, although the crew are more nervous of food while sat in the
cabin. Helgur has just opened his computer to download pictures of the
muddle in the cabin. Three people in a small space with clothes,
waterproofs, sleeping bags and shoes everywhere. But we are coping well
and at least they had a couple of days to get used to the motion before
the sun disappeared.
Sigrit has recovered enough from a headache last
night (that could not possibly have been to avoid night watches) to be eating
raisins now. Helgur and I had them in our porridge this
morning.
|