May 23 – no wind, no rain
I’m in zone UTC -1 for ship’s time now so my sunset is approx 3 hours after yours. And looking at the nautical almanac, I see your sunset this evening would have been around 18h30 your time and mine is 18h00 UTC + my 20°W so 19h20 UTC which would be almost 21h20 your time. It’s taken a while but I’m getting used to the time zone thing. Moving to the northern hemisphere will create some chaos with the adding and subtracting of declinations. I’ve had extremely light wind the last 36 hours. At one stage very early this morning I dropped my code zero and centred the main just to stop the rhythmic flogging. It was driving me nuts and not good for the sails. An hour later about 7 knots of SE came up so we got underway again, but still very slowly. I think Kirsten has caught up over 100 miles on me, but she’s much further East and heading straight for Cabo Verde. I’m still aiming a bit west and hoping to get around the top of the Azores high. There are two things I haven’t seen since day three; Another ship or yacht and rain! Not a drop. I haven’t had a chance to test my awning for rain catching but it’s doing a great job as a sunshade. One of my water bladders has a leak so I lost most of the contents of that. I still have 100 ltr in the other one, plus what’s left in the main 102 ltr tank and I have a 25 ltr can in the lazarette.
So I’ll be fine for water this trip, but I do want to test the rain-catching.
It’s hot here. Moer. But not as hot as I remember it being on Wings. Still, I poured a couple of buckets over my head this morning as the breeze came in and let it cool me down. It felt really good. I’m hoping this wind which has gone SW now will hold through the night. My forecast had shown lots of nothing so it’s a bonus to have. I’m sailing at 4.5 – 5.5 , about 65° off the wind which is very much the limit for the code zero but I can bear away if I need to relieve pressure and head a bit more north. So I’m not worried, I just want to get through the calms!
Cheers for now,
J
Great update Jeremy, what is your planned daily ration of fresh water ? Thx. Praying for you, Mark