the home straight
NORDLYS
David and Annette Ridout
Tue 25 Mar 2008 22:31
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The Home Straight
7:16S 49:08W
Tuesday 25th March
2008
1630 hrs.
Last Sunday, Easter Sunday, morning saw Nordlys
hurling herself north westwards with 20/25 knots of wind on the beam and some
very rough seas on top of a large swell. The latter had been forecast by
the Brazilian Navy. Apparently some storm way up north had caused
it. We have subsequently heard that the Virgin Islands had some of the
largest swells that they had experienced in fifteen years. Life on board
was fairly basic. Motion was very jerky and the cockpit was being
constantly lightly sprayed so we stayed down below and read, did sudoku and just
existed. There was a heavy overcast and high humidity but the endless rain
squalls had stopped and the worst evils of the ITCZ were we felt behind
us. Moral was also boosted by a good knot of current with us.
Slowly things improved and this morning the reefs
were let go, the genoa fully unfurled and now we have just put up the
reacher. The reason for this rather over energetic
action being that the wind has gone down to 15/18 knots and moved slightly aft
but more importantly there is a knot and a half of current against us. We
were warned of this by a friend who is a few hundred miles in front of us.
He has also given us the point at which he came out of this
rogue and conditions revert to the expected NW flowing
current. This all probably sounds extremely minor to
my readers but after well over two weeks at sea suddenly and unusually for this
part of the ocean having your daily runs reduced by over 40 miles is to put
it mildly rather annoying. There I can write without reverting to
the word which flows naturally I am afraid in such circumstances! A German
yachtie friend of long experience said to me that looking back on his days of
astro navigation he now realises that often when he thought that he had done an
inaccurate sight it was not probably the case but was due to an unexpected
current flow. Certainly modern logs coupled with GPS have shown me that
the ocean is full of the most unexpected and often strong current eddies that
have little or nothing to do with the various Admiralty current diagrams that
the worlds hydrographers put out.
So with the sun shining in a cloudless sky we are
just 721 miles from Scarborough, Tobago. Nordlys was last there in
2001 thus technically we will have finished our circumnavigation.
However as far as we are concerned this will occur some time in summer 2009
when she is safely tucked up in her berth in Lymington. Since she left
Scarborough she has been up to the Canadian boarder, crossed the Pacific,
explored the islands of that great ocean for two seasons, left Australia to
starboard and visited many Indian Ocean anchorages. All told over 55,000
miles. She will get a well deserved rest in two weeks in Grenada where we
will leave her for the summer.
I will write again with the odd picture when we are
at anchor and the keyboard is not jumping around before my eyes as my legs brace
themselves to hold me in my seat. Actually thank goodness they have
to do that occasionally as apart from struggling to the top of the steps in St
Helena and walking the sand dunes of Ascension island to look at giant turtles
they have done little for well over a month now.
David
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