Wind is about 16knots, we're making a steady 7 towards the Azores with 2 reefs in the main. 7 miles an hour isn't particularly fast really ... I could run faster, though admittedly not on water!
I am back in my personality comfort zone now that I have a dashboard I can watch regularly to see those miles decrease! I can tell already that we will now start to have inter-watch competitions to see who can do the best mileage in their 2 hour session...
I also was toying with the idea of putting together a template for "a day on the ocean wave" along the following lines (with yesterdays info):
- Dolphins. Check. 2 separate groups of green dolphins. The second bunch (in the evening) much more playful around our bow. Amongst their group they have an olympic class high jumper who to our complete astonishment jumped what must have been 10 feet out of the water!!! Completely crazy.
- Flying Fish. Check. No flying fish mortality overnight however.
- Giant Squid. Check 3 board in a daring midnight piracy attempt to take over the boat. However, my valiant defenders Barry and Andy managed to fight them off. Mortality - 1, returned to the sea alive with minor injuries and strict instructions not to attempt such a coup again - 2.
Sailing jellyfish. Check. Lots.
Container ship passing in the distance. Check. Quite far away though, probably about 10 miles, we didn't need to check her details or make contact with her.
Electrical Storm. Negative.
Rain. Negative (boo!!!!)
A couple of people asked me about the watch system, what do we do at night etc... so *I thought I'd give you a quick rundown of some of the basics.
Dinah is a Jeanneau One Design French built boat that has been significantly modified by Barry and his preparateur Bob for offshore single-handed sailing. This means that she has a lot of extra things that normal boats wouldn't have (particularly electronics) and she doesn't have a lot of things that normal boats would have (some of the "home comforts"). If you're interested in more info about her, and about all the modifications they have done, take a look at Barry's blog site www.dinah.sail.ie.
She has a bow cabin (up front in the pointy end!) which contains the sailing stuff that we're not using. Racing sails and fenders for example. In a race, Barry would be changing sails regularly throughout the day, trying to maximise his speed according to the variable wind conditions. We're just running under mainsail and our standard jib for this trip, as an extra mile or two an hour doesn't really impact us. Fenders we last used in the marina in NJ, and we will use them again in the Azores. We will be jumping for joy when we take them out!!!
In the middle/main saloon section she has 1 bunk on either side. (No table, which you would normally expect to find here.) A small galley area is on the port side, with a 2 ring gas (propane for those in the US) burner (one burner is not working!) and a sink (but no running water as we have no holding tank since the modifications to make it a racing boat). And the all important navigation table is on the starboard side. This is where all the electronics are, the computer, sat phone, vhf radio, gps system, log book etc. as well as the paper / laminated charts of where we are going and potential fallback ports in case we run into trouble.
At the stern is what I call "the cave". This is the area under the cockpit, at either side of and behind the engine block. Here we store our food, water, first aid kit, spare parts for pretty much everything on board, plus our bags of clothes. Salt gets literally everywhere on a trip like this, even inside zipped bags. So everything is double and triple wrapped. Food is all in tightly sealed tupperware containers. Clothes are in individual ziploc bags within larger bags (so if one item gets wet you don't lose your entire wardrobe). To get at any food you have to crawl around in the cave with your torch, unstacking and restacking boxes until you find what you want, and then reversing out again ... not very dignified!
Since the weather is quite stable at the moment we are running a 2hours on - 2 hours standby - 2 hours off watch system. This means there's always one person in the cockpit. If things are calm the other 2 can be sleeping, with one ready to spring into action if required. During the days however it's a bit too hot to be down below, so we tend to all be in the cockpit, listening to music, chatting and generally just whiling the time away. When Barry is racing obviously he has to be on watch all the time himself. Effectively this means, he gets very little sleep. Typically the resting time that worked best for him during OSTAR was 13 minutes. So whenever he thought things looked stable he would settle down for a nap, setting his alarm clock for 13 minutes. His alarm is appropriately called a "Screaming Meanie" designed so that no human being could possibly sleep through it. Then he would wake up, check everything, and hopefully settle down again.
When the weather has been rougher for us, we have done a 3hour overlapping watch system, where there are always 2 people on deck. This obviously means you get less sleep which personally I find very challenging.... in fact this whole disrupted sleep pattern is for me the most difficult part of the adventure.
Barry downloads localised wind reports regularly via our sat phone (Thank You Iridium for sponsoring this for us!). He then makes routing decisions based on these. Last week you'll recall we took a dive south to avoid some weather that he saw brewing when we were at 40 North ... we came some 150 miles further south than our original plan in order to avoid that. Well, though it was painful adding 150 miles to our trip, and into the wind as well - it turns out to have been an excellent decision. 2 other OSTAR skippers went much closer to that weather system than we did (possibly because Barry was concerned about Andy and I and he was playing it more safely than he might while sailing solo as the other 2 are) and we've had reports that they are now some 300 miles behind us having experienced very difficult conditions for a couple of days.
And finally - we are running the boat on Universal Time. (One hour behind British Summer time.) This is a bit strange as it's getting dark and bright at "unusual" times... Like the "dawn watch" starts at about 10am UTC! The reason we do this is because all the forecasts and charts tend to use UTC as their base, so it means we shouldn't make conversion mistakes when doing calculations.
So there you go. Hopefully that's enough detail! Now time for more sleep!
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