Trucial Coast, Day 9 – Whales!
We have had our first whale sighting! I was sat on watch yesterday afternoon and between waves I saw what I thought was a bigger, black rubber buoy or something like that – only 20-25 metres away. It disappeared and then reappeared a couple of more times, once with a second one alongside as they moved off astern of us.I’m pretty sure they were doing something called spy-hopping, which is where whales will poke their heads above the surface so their eyes are out of the water and they can take a look around. Based on identification charts we’ve been given by the ARC organisers, I reckon we saw long-finned pilot whales. So that was all rather exciting!
We had another fairly peaceful night – there was a squall at 3 a.m. that required a rapid reefing of the main, but as it happened at a change of watch, and as the reefing was completed quickly and easily I don’t think it counts as a drama any more – we’ve come a long way since Las Palmas! (1185 nautical miles to be precise! While we’re at it, DTF is 1630 miles if you’re interested.)
The weather looks set to hold throughout the day – cloudy skies, Force 4 from south east, gentle swells getting more gentle. So we’re hoping for a bit of a rest day – snooze, potter about a bit, go fishing for the first time. Given how expectations have been continually confounded so far, that probably means we’ll be in a Force 8 in about 3 hours time…. Our weather predictions come from a variety of sources – ARC organisers supply a daily forecast and Rob accesses various weather faxes from sources around the globe. He also gets GRIB (GRid In Binary) files – these are quite amazing. They are pure computer modelling of expected conditions anywhere in the world, with no human interpretation. They’ve been as accurate as anything so far and are the only source to suggest the south-easterly winds we’ve been having.
We’re still hugging our rhum line from the point when we finished running mainly south and turned to the west. A rhum line is the great circle route, the shortest distance between two points on the globe. We follow it because the rhum line is the quickest route to the rum line at the bar in Rodney Bay Marina, St Lucia. We seem to have got the ocean to ourselves now. For most of the journey so far, there have been 2-4 boats visible at any time, normally on the horizon – sails by day and masthead lights by night. However for about the last 24 hours there’s been nothing, and radar confirms this. Maybe we should shower more often? We do see occasional large vessels – like the cargo ship that passed half a mile off our port side last night whilst Rob & I were faffing about in the dark trying to reattach the mainsail to the boom. The shackle had buckled – and the last time we had a full main out was the first night, so we reckon it was bouncing about in the horrible swells when the wind died that did the damage. Replaced and sorted now anyway: all in a day’s work!
Halfway point is about 200 miles away now – so should be reached tomorrow afternoon. The plans for our dinner party are well underway and I’ll share them with you tomorrow. All I’ll say now is be there or be square, it’s going to be the ONLY party to go to in this 400 square miles of the Atlantic. Quite literally.
