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Diary Days
since leaving home

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16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25
26	Video

Every now and again a wave breaks on the side and we get spray, very welcome it is because we have to keep the hatches shut so its sweltering below.

I was taking the noon sight when a particularly big one broke and the sextant box got half full of water, thank goodness it was the £5 plastic one that Dougie got in Shetland not the £1000 one that I had been using some days!

• Swiftwing is a 42 feet Ferrocrete Hartley Fugiean Ketch.
• We are making around about 6 1/2 knots average giving a daily run of just over 150 nautical miles depending on the wind and sea of course.
• Swell height is 3 to 4 meters just now.
• Cabin temperature 27 degrees (downstairs) with a night time temperature of about 24.
• Estimated wind speed 20 to 30 knots from the east.
• We are running for the most part with a twizzle rig which is twin head sails on a single roller reefer.
• Bob's fix is still holding up and he has not missed a beat! 

I think I will get a shower today the generator is on and the water-maker is running so I will grab the chance.

We were talking to a Norwegian yacht yesterday and passed another within 3 miles today but he wasn't into talking.

The repairs to the self steering is holding up well now that I have lashed extra string around it so fingers crossed etc.

The table that the laptop is on has got a wobble so when the boat rolls at certain times the laptop skips over one key so there is quite a bit of backspacing involved.

Got a sun sight with the sextant yesterday noon and was a few miles out but with the boat going up and down the swell and rolling around I reckon that anything that would let us find the island will be good enough in my book.

I tried on my night watch to take a sight on the pole star and though I could find the star ok I couldn't really see the line of the horizon because it was too dark so it was no good as a sight, I'll get today's noon one in about an hour, it ought to be about 12 minutes later today as we have made good progress.   So that's it; breakfasted, showered, cleared the decks of flying fish before they go smelly, checked the jury rig on Bob, spliced a couple of drogue chutes onto a rope, sounds like a full morning, think I need a nap after my noon sight LOL.. (It was my turn for the double watch last night)

I think I have told you about Bob, the sixth member of the crew, he is Aeries and he never does any work in the galley, all he does is steers the boat to the wind, all day, every day.  Well when we had the light winds at the start Bob went on strike and wouldn't do his work, so we had to steer by hand, but once we got into the Trade Winds he has been a stalwart, hardly missing a beat, until a few days ago when he had a breakdown, nerves I suppose.  Anyway, he was right as rain again once he got a new piece of Kevlar rope, and looked rather fetching with its white and pin stripe blue.  Well yesterday we were all hiding from the sun and the boat started messing about again but this time it wasn't Bob, it was the weld where the tiller arm goes onto the rudder that broke. (Bob uses the tiller, when we manually steer we use a different bit connected to the wheel by hydraulics) so there was a bit of despair, we thought we had 6 days of hand steering to do, which would have been a chore, you really have to concentrate on the compass all the time, I had a bit of a rummage about and found some thick polished stainless plates that Dougie had got made for holding the rigging wires so the plates, a handful of bolts, the inevitable wooden wedge and another handful of jubilee clips.  We have a jury rigged rudder that so far has been good for 150 miles, it has needed tightening a couple of times but that's to be expected.  It didn't look quite Heath Robinson enough so last night I added some thin rope which stops it from creeping apart.  Fingers are crossed, wood has been touched, so it might hold out for a bit longer.  If it lasts the whole way I will send a couple of photos to the jubilee clip company, they might get a kick out of it.

Last night was another good night for shooting stars, I have a whole backlog of wishes, looking forward to getting home : )   Its a wee bit cloudy today so I don't think I will get my mid-day sun sight but its only for fun anyway.  The line of crosses on the chart is creeping closer but we still have to remind ourselves that its still two and a half Norway crossings so we don't get complacent.

I'm glad we took the old cutter route of going south first, sounds like some of those guys have had it rough, touching all sorts of timber, we have only had a couple of days of moderately rough. 

Getting a soaking was just the thing, I was gasping and trying to cool off on my bed and had just dampened my tee shirt and sat in the wind, you get out of practice coping with it, used to be I couldn't have enough of the hot weather!

The wind is now steady from the west and we were sailing down with two sails at the head of the boat, that was when it was really rolling, we are now zig zagging instead so the boat mainly just leans and rocks a bit now unless someone goes into the galley and then it rolls like mad until the food preparation is done - well that's what it seems like.  Sitting outside is really pleasant, you can while away the time looking over the deep blue waves, not at all green or grey like home and when the waves peak and the sun shines through its iridescent blue, really bonny.

Our dolphins have deserted us too, hopefully we will see the Caribbean dolphins soon, they will be recognisable 'cos of their rasta hats!

I have never actually been seasick yet though I had a lot of kinda green times at the start but they were always better when I was up on deck, now I seem to be over it though if we go back to the twin headsails who knows?

Neil is standing in the galley reading and the boat is getting confused, it thinks someone is cooking so its plunging a bit!

We have just over a thousand miles to go so I'm allowing myself to imagine that we may arrive in time not to have to scurry straight for the plane. I was chuckling to myself this afternoon, I was sitting on the rail in shorts and lifejacket dragging my feet in the sea with no land in any direction for a thousand miles and just amused by the sheer improbability of it all, if fact I think that I sat a bit long and took a bit much rays 'cos I took a nap right after.

We are still sailing with "normal" sails rather than the twin headsail so the rolling is considerably reduced. We had a yacht just in sight all night (maybe 4 miles) but with daybreak we lost sight of him, (the lights are the highest thing).

The satellite phone handset is playing up so we can't take or make phone calls but the mail seems ok so that's fine, but remember not to panic if we are not in contact, you know how temperamental computers can be. It's the old thing about electronics and water.

It was quite rainy in the night and the boat was rolling around a lot so I took my liner/sheet to the saloon and slept on the couch before my shift and then after my shift I had a bright plan and tied my liner/sheet to a bolt at the back of my bunk, it made a huge difference - I'm in a top bunk and its about shoulder high so this is why I'm a wee bit pre-occupied with the rolling out prospect.

Anyways after the rain the wind shifted around a wee bit so we had to change the set of the sails and that has made a world of difference to the motion, made me much happier.  It made us slightly slower but we still did more than our minimum required miles so all is well. 

We are right in the middle and we sometimes see birds, they are like pure white swallow tailed terns. We saw two yachts on the radar but no visible sightings all day. Didn't do a sextant sighting, just pure laziness this time, though at that time we were still hurling about a bit, ach yes, that was the reason. :)

That's about it from the mid Atlantic, another good days run which is slightly increasing our comfort margin.

We have really big seas now because, I guess, the wind is always in the same direction, they are big but not rough kind of like the Pentland Firth a couple of days after there has been a storm, according to the books it will get bigger but the spaces between get longer at the same time.

We have finished running South and are now pointing in the right direction for our destination at last and we have the trade winds blowing and are making quite good speed, more importantly we are making steady good speed.

After my first try with the sextant being just about spot on, I missed yesterday because there was clouds blocking the sun, then today I had everything all ready in time, took about a dozen readings and convinced myself that ten of them were ok, put the sextant away and did my calculations and found that I was hundreds of miles out, thank heavens for GPS I say!

My turn for two watches tonight so I have been taking a nap this afternoon to catch up beforehand but of course that doesn't work, I ended up reading in my bunk.

For excitement we had a sighting of a yacht during the night and a cargo ship today. The weather is good and I am taking care not to burn by hiding under the cover during the mid-day, the seas are quite big and quite often a big wall of water will appear but the boat rides them well, the only symptom being that it rolls, spilling anything that is left sitting around, so there is nothing lying around now, its all tucked away.

Corned beef hash on the menu tonight, the fresh fruit and veggies are holding out fine and the long life milk is, well, long life milk.

We have just seen another yacht and had a chat with them on the radio they are Belgians on board the German boat DIVA, they are in the arc so you can see their position on the arc map. He told us that most of the arc boats turned west earlier so they are ahead but we ought to get better winds by being south so it ought to balance out.

Its been a scorcher today, I think I got a wee bit too much sun despite factor 50 but I've been for a nap and feel brand new now, it could just be that it was my turn last night to stand two watches with 3 hrs sleep in between.

A bit of a chore in theory but before the moon came up it was pitch black with the sky studded with squdrillions of stars when the dolphins came out to play. 

Our eyes (Neil shared the watch), were fully dark adjusted and we were seeing the phosphorescent trails through the water so clearly that you could see the shapes of them, they were having a great time, six abreast leaping and diving about the bows and sometimes they would nudge each other, which gave an even brighter flash of light. Talk about special effects those guys had it to a tee.  It was better than daylight as you could see the happenings down deep, usually the reflections from the surface stop you from seeing down.

The second watch was much more mundane, we saw a couple of ships and one yacht, there was another yacht on the radar and he was stopped in front of us and then after an hour took off like a scalded cat, I suspect he was having a nap.

We are doing three hour shifts through the night and doubled up in darkness, this means that someone has two shifts in a night so there is a lot of catnapping going on. We are making steady if not spectacular progress and the boat is looking really smart with one sail out each side, held out on poles so that they do not flap around."