Trucial Coast, Day 11 - 1416 miles down, 1416 to go…
Andrew Hunt December 5th, 2007
Well at 0230 today, our distance travelled from Las Palmas was 1416 nautical miles and our distance to St Lucia along the rhum line was also 1416 nautical miles, which is as good a reason for saying we’re halfway as any! So we’ll treat ourselves a bit today: I’m going to have a beer at lunch - first alcoholic drink for me since we left Las Palmas (I know this may sound hard to believe, but it’s true!). I’ll also have a shower this afternoon and this evening I’ve got a small number of unusual whiskeys, brandies and ports in a presentation pack that we may sample. Vicky you’re an absolute star, what a cracking idea for a Christmas present! Many thanks!
It’s an exercise in nothing more than speculation but just for the record (so I can pat myself on the back should this be at all accurate) I think we’re going to arrive in St Lucia between 0100 on 14th December and 1700 on 15th December, probably somewhere bang in the middle of that range. Isn’t it amazing that with all the technology at my disposal I can still only come up with a 40 hour window for our arrival! But we’re obviously dependent on the weather ahead and whilst long-range forecasting can give good indications of trends I don’t think it’s precise enough for me to be any more accurate.
Talking of technology, here’s a bit of a run down of all the gear we have on board. We have a GPS system which incorporates a chart plotter. We’ve actually just sailed into an uncharted area of the Atlantic, so rather than the usual contours of the sea bed, we just have a plain blue background showing now. I’m a bit disappointed in this as I’d have loved it to say “Here Be Dragons”! This chart plotter shows us our speed through the water and over the ground, and our course over the water and over the ground (taking into account currents etc). It shows us the distance in a straight line to the northern tip of St Lucia, and how far off our original plotted course we are (33.72 nautical miles south of it at the moment: the wind has come slightly north of east, so we’re being pushed south of the track. But we do have 1354 nautical miles in which to come back up onto course….). We’ve got instruments on deck that display much of this data to the helm. We have 2 radio systems, on VHF and one using SSB (no idea what this actually means, but it does have better range than VHF). We have something called a Navtex that displays various bits of information and warnings from coastal authorities round the world. As we’re about 1000 miles from the nearest coast it’s been quiet recently. But as we left Las Palmas we were warned to look out for plagues of locusts, which concerned me because I knew we’d forgotten to load two of every animal onto the boat.
We’ve got an iridium phone as well so should never be out of touch. Rob connects to the internet once or twice a day, either through the SSB system (slow and limited bandwidth) or through the iridium phone (much quicker, but we only have a limited bundle of minutes to last us till St Lucia). There’s all sorts of other stuff on the boat, but these are the key ones as far as our navigation etc goes. These, along with things like the fridge and freezer compressors, are the main drain on our batteries. We have an onboard generator that runs for about 4-5 hours a day to pump juice back into the batteries and we’re finding we need to run the engine every now and again as well to really charge them. So the hum of the generator or clatter of the motor is a surprisingly frequent accompaniment to our days.
We’re running along goosewinged with twin headsails today in front of a Force 5 sometimes 6. There’s a fairly large sea following us so we do surf down the back of some pretty big waves. We’re above 7 knots as often as we are below it and we’ve covered quite a lot of ground in the last few hours. It’s pretty exhilarating sailing, and whilst there is a fair amount of roll, we can definitely live with it! So hopefully it will continue all day and tomorrow I can report a record day’s distance to you.
- General , Sail Race ARC , Staff Travels
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