6 December 2007 4pm

The wind’s dropped a notch and so has the boat speed.  This I am afraid is to be expected.  Lot’s of reading in all departments at the moment.

One evening in Mindelo I came back to the boat to find Sotitis watching a  DVD on his laptop in silence.  It appears that in an attempt to create space on the machine for his photographs, he has thrown out the sound drivers.  Nik and I try to reason out what to do  but his computer is

a)  a PC and

b) in Greek

We locate the Sound Control Panel but it’s all greyed out. We eventually give up.  At least most of his films have sub-titles.

8PM

The Sky tonight looks exactly like one of my storm cloud discs.  Could this be a question of nature imitating art? Or  nature imitating art’s imitation of nature?

It’s Nik’s name day today.  It’s also my brother-in-law Nico’s name day.  It never occurred to me that the Finns and the Greeks would share name days.

The wind has gone back to the NE so we’re off track by 10 degrees. I don’t really mind going a little bit East of track as when we clear the ITCZ and get the Southern Hemisphere trade winds they should be from the SE and will push us Westwards whether we like it or not. The big  question is how hard will they push?

The current forecast doesn’t look all that great, although its very lively on the Brazilian coast at the moment.  It’s still early days.

We had chicken tonight.  Well, Nik Steve and I did. Sotiris had a glass of whiskey.

We tried to work out if the chicken was Greek, French, Gibraltarian or Capo Verdian, but couldn’t.  Big crisis.   The ice is finished.  If the weather calms a bit more we’ll be able to run the icemaker and do a spot of fishing.

9PM

Big excitement. Another Ship 2 miles off the port bow.  Sotiris grabs the VHF convinced that there will be a Greek crew on this cargo ship, pushes all the buttons and manages to lock the VHF so it won’t transmit.  Nik gives it to me and after a minute of head scratching I clear it and it works again, but there is no answer to the Greek call for it is not a cargo ship but a fishing boat trawling lazily across our bow 800 miles offshore with no Greeks on board. I am however beginning to wonder if we should limit Sotiris’ contact with anything electronic. Meanwhile the sky overhead has cleared but there is lightning in the distance.

Friday 7/12/07

7AM

Three hours of heavy rain last night but no lightning.  The wind has gone NNE so we’ve had to gybe and pole out. Making a bit of easting is one thing, heading to Africa quite another.

We are now just over a quarter of the way to Rio and where the ITCZ was three days ago.  It’s gone South.  We’re able to make 6 knots but if it drops to 5 knots I will consider using the engine which has been resting since we left Mindelo.

Doing a quarter of the trip in 4 days buys a lot of time when we have to go slower. When I calculate the number of days for a leg it’s on a conservative basis of 160 miles per day or just over 6 ½ knots average.  On that basis we have another 12 ¾ days to go which would get us in on the 20^th. As we’re going slightly slower at the moment the ETA on the Nav program is the 21^st which would also be fine. However as I said before, it’s early days.  I’ll look at this again when we’re half way.