torture on the high seas...

Remember my lovely "distance-to-go-meter" that I was waiting to kick in once we went below 999miles to Faial? Well ... I couldn't believe my eyes when I went on deck for my first watch this morning to find that it has been taped over with red electrical insulating tape!!! NOOOOOOO... how am I going to track our progress now???? It's torture!

It turns out that Andy taped it over, not as a joke which was my initial assumption, but because he finds it frustrating to watch it tick by so slowly and not really be able to influence it very much. Amazing how two people can love and hate the same thing! Still it's a good reminder that "it's about the journey, not the destination" and that we need to live in the present rather than be constantly focused on some future goal - so I am trying to learn these lessons from Andy's frustration.

We made great progress overnight, but our wind has dropped significantly this morning. We're back on our full mainsail (first time in days) at 38 25.67N 40 38.78W.

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We will be saying goodbye to the 40s this morning, and probably we will need to do some motoring in the afternoon to keep some kind of decent pace going. We have 560 miles to go`(she says, immediately ignoring her philosophical statements about the destination versus the journey!!!). I can see this on another instrument down below - but don't tell Andy!!!

We are now out of the gulf stream. The water temperature has dropped by about 3 degrees - it's still very warm (27 degrees) but over a comparitively short distance it's a significant drop. That has sadly put an end to our sailing jellyfish friends and the flying fish also have thinned out significantly (no midnight boarders last night).

A couple of people asked me what do we do "on watch" - and the simple answer is - "we watch".

First and foremost we watch what's happening in our immediate vicinity. - Are there any hazards in the water? Just now for example we have seen an oil drum thing float by, which would not be good to hit... a few days ago we saw a whole tree trunk in the water.... - Are there any other vessels nearby? These are rare (like one a day) at the moment, but as we approach the Azores the frequency will increase.

You're also watching the weather and how Dinah is handling it. - We currently have her set to sail at a certain angle to the wind (80 degrees at the moment). Every so often the wind will shift, and sailing at 80 degrees may no longer be taking you where you want to go ... so you might need to adjust your course, and/or how your sails are configured. - Also you need to keep track of the wind strength - in lighter winds you need more sail area to maximise your speed - but you need to be careful you don't get any surprise gusts that would be difficult for the autohelm to handle. - And you keep an eye on the cloud formations and how they are travelling. Is there any thunder/lightening in the area (in which case you'd pay more attention to your paper log just in case you lose your electronics). Might there be the possibility of stronger winds or wind shifts associated with clouds? And optimistically, might there be any possibility of some rain associated with the clouds to remove some of this accumulation of salt!

And then you're doing a combination of - thinking... very deep thoughts like how did I get here, where am I going, etc... Watch out world - this amount of space to think about things can't be good! - listening to music / audiobooks etc... - watching the local wildlife - trying to avoid the worst of the splashes - if there are more than one person on deck then chatting, singing etc.

So that's it really ...