North Easterly or NORTH Easterly
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Sat 28 Nov 2009 05:17
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On the night watch again. It is a beautiful night
with a waxing moon and very little cloud in an otherwise starry sky. We are at
position 17:16.57N 043:05.69W at 0200 ships time. To keep ships time we have
been altering (back) our watches and the ships clock each day by 20 minutes. The
theory here was that it should take us about 15 days to cross the Atlantic and
we would hope to arrive at a time zone (Antigua) which would be 5 hours behind
UTC - previously known as Greenwich Meant Time. However as we have been gybing
the whole trip we will do at least 25% but probably nearer 30% more than
the straight line distance to Cape Verde from Gran Canaria and Gran Canaria
to Antigua and the passage will take us at least 18 days we kept time for
three days. This route is the Southern Route and is already the longest in miles
of the three recognised routes for this passage so we are going to be sailing a
hell of a lot of miles - more than 3,500 for this crossing alone. I also expect
if we make safe landfall in Antigua that we will have sailed Rhiann Marie close
to 6000 miles in the past three months. Considering she is a new boat and loaded
with systems and equipment we have remarkably few problems -
yet! We hope by mid day Saturday to have
only 1000 miles left to run.
We are still consistently plugging in the 200 mile
plus days with seven in a row now, 1541 miles in seven days. There have
been four hour watches where 40 miles has been covered for the watch and
230 miles is our best day. We are going for ten 200+ 's in a row, but
this will be difficult as the winds are forecast to ease to 10 - 15 knots as
opposed to 15 - 20 which we have been having.
On night watches or when there is a heavy swell or
big motion on the boat we had initially been using Raymarine lifetags with one
watch handing over to the other. This is of course in addition to our
lifejackets. Our lifejackets are Gael Force Fastnet XTpro which are 150N ( I
will have the same model made in 275Newton bouyancy for next
year) sprayhoods and crotch straps fitted and with integral harness. They
are extremely comfortable and light. We were very
disciplined about the lifetag protocol but then we started getting irrregular
alarms from them and of course everyone became immune to reacting to the alarms
so we reviewed the policy. We now dont use the tags as they are currently
unreliable and instead we clip on whenever leaving the cockpit to the helm or
any where else, at night and whenever we deem it neessary through the day
also.
Yesterday Angus, who does crosswords (as well as
other things) asked if I knew the name of an inland waterway in the centre of
America. At least that is what he thought he asked me. I immediately responded
Panama (canal). The question was written name a Central American inland
waterway. He read it as being in the centre of America not Central America. I
think this phenemonnomanonn?? (its 0230!) explains why the dependable trade
winds down here at 17 deg North of the equator are Easterly. I always
understood these winds to be North Easterly. However there are trade winds Noth
and South of the equator and perhaps these are the
NORTH "Easterly Trade" winds and the
whole thing has been a misunderstanding all along!
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