4PM Saturday 7/12/07

We like this ESE wind just forward of the beam. 11 knots of it gives us 7 knots of boat speed and the 16 knots  at the moment gives 9.2 knots.

We’re petty well settled into the routine by now.  Nik got a pink face on the sun deck. He’s revising his economics text books, Sotiris is reading, Steve’s reading and doing Suduko, and I’m reading having done the Saturday NY Times X word and the weekend double acrostic.

Below decks its 32C or  88F. Current ETA is the 17^th but it’s too early to take that seriously. We are doing 9 knots plus at the moment.  I keep thinking it can’t last.

There’s this rock in the middle of the Atlantic 500 miles or so offshore from Brazil with a lighthouse and what looks like a lagoon.  We were hoping to stop there for a break burt it will be dark  by the time we get there so it’s probably not going to be possible.  We will cross the equator in the dark. Nik was hoping to swim across.

All bad timing but good for a quick run to Rio.

21:00 Saturday

So we’re sailing along happily with 15 knots on the beam and there’s a small bang and the head of the Yankee is no longer attached to the halyard.  A couple of quick turns on the furler and the sail stays more or less up with surprisingly little loss in boat speed. Steve goes up the mast to investigate and finds that the shackle attaching the sail to the halyard has vanished.

He replaces it and after 20 minutes up the mast he comes down. 35 minutes after the incident we are back on track with no harm done.  My request that we mouse the halyard shackles is greeted with incongruity but fixing this in a warm sunny afternoon with no sea running is one thing, having to do it in the Drake Passage at night, quite another.

For those of you who don’t know, mousing a shackle is lashing the  end of the shackle pin to the body of the shackle with siezing wire in such a way that the pin cannot turn and come undone.

21:30

We’ve just approached  Pedro E Sao Paulo and there are  2 or 3 ships anchored there.

There is activity on the VHF and there is debate amongst my crew as to weather they are speaking Arabic, Japanese or Portugese.  It turns out one of them at least is a Brazillian Scientific ship studying something to do with fish genetics. The  language was difficult.  Had we not waited for the fuel we didn’t really need we would have arrived here  during daylight and could have made more interesting contact.  As it is we pass a mile or so away.  The position of the  rock is 00:55.1241N 029:20.7651W. Maybe this will show up on Google Earth.

2:30 AM

When I woke for my watch at 2AM the boat was struggling a bit as the wind had gone SSE and this is more to windward than a gentleman likes to go, however after 15 minutes or so it went back to SE  i.e. 60 Degrees off the port bow and everything became comfortable again

Sotiris cooked last night, a dish with pork fillet and peas which he says is traditional  but I’d never had it before.  Since he was cooking I thought he would join us for dinner but I was wrong. He just had a small taste in the galley.  I will wake everyone in an hour or so as we are approaching the equator.

4:09 AM

We cross the equator at 9.3 knots. 2 miles before I woke Steve and Nik, Sotiris was already up.  As we got  within  ½ mile I doused the  yankee, headed down wind (almost West) and Neptune appeared; to offer the traditional initiation rites to the poor souls trespassing his domain for the first time.  This consists of dousing the acolyte in food, mostly pasta and  some very tired flying fish.  When the mess was cleaned up  we reset the sails and charged across the line.