But I've been holding out on telling you about another species, waiting for a day like today where there's not a whole lot happening. We've been seeing a lot of these really cool things which are jellyfish with sails. They're about 6 inches long and come in a variety of colours. You can have transparent with pink bottoms, black bottoms or blue bottoms, you can have fluorescent pink, or you can have white with black bottoms. They're very sweet and look like little boats kids would have in their bathtubs. For the first couple of days Andy was certain that we were pulling his leg about them - but that might be partly because we were trying to convince him they were red, white and blue for the 4th July! But now even Andy is a firm fan of these little creatures.
It seems that their mode of transport is to inflate a little sail and bob along on the surface until they reach wherever they want to go. Sadly they haven't quite mastered the art of sailing and tend to capsize very frequently.
Each evening we seem to have one container ship pass us reasonably closely. A few nights ago it was Gypsum Centennial which passed us about 0.3 miles away. That was a bit too close for comfort and actually was down to an error on my part where I mis-read the software and thought it was heading away from us!!! We bore away and crossed in front of it and then radioed them effectively to say "sorry about that, we're out of your way now Mr Big Ship"... the conversation went as follows - - standard radio protocol where you call their name 3 times and say yours 3 times - they acknowledge "yacht Dinah, this is Gypsum Centennial" - we say please switch to channel 10 - they ack "switching to 10" (and we all switch) - hello captain, this is yacht Dinah, we are a small sailing vessel off your starboard bow, just checking that you see us - and the response came "yes thank you Yacht Dinah, very nice, Gypsum Centennial out" !!!
Not exactly a great conversationalist our chap on Gypsum Centennial!
The next night we passed a couple of miles from "Cornelia" who kindly altered course to stay out of our way. After they passed us they pulled back to their original course, and then someone on deck flashed his very bright torch at us. One flash. We flashed back - one flash. He flashed 2 flashes. We flashed 2 flashes... Thankfully he left it at that or it could have been a long night :-)
So - for today, we have 15 knots on the beam. We still have 3 reefs in from yesterday but will shake one out shortly. Our position is 38 07.06N, 51 51.66W.
All going well we should break the "1000 miles to go" milestone this evening. That will be cause for major celebration I think. We have one instrument in the cockpit which should show us distance to go, but its max reading is 999 - so it will be a major psychogical boost for us all when we can see the countdown start to happen in real time.
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