The way we've set the watches, three hours on, six hours off, means that we're each on at a different time every day, until the pattern repeats every three days. So here I am back on the dawn watch three days later, and writing again. I'm starting an hour later today because i couldn't find the little LED light I was using to write by in the pre dawn, it's either gone over the side or someone's put it away in a "new" place.
So what's new? We're in the tropics! We had some discussion about whether the tropic of cancer is at 23 degrees or 23 and a half, but either way we crossed 23 degrees lat yesterday morning. Now I know that this conjures up visions of basking in sunshine, but in fact, here I am sitting in three layers of clothes, plus my woolly ski hat, trying to stay warm. Well, it is just after dawn. At least I don't feel the need for my thermals any more, which I was wearing the first couple of nights out of Gran Canaria.
So what's been the excitement over the last few days? Nothing as dramatic as a rope on the rudder thankfully. We tried to pole out the genoa on the end of the spinaker pole on Sunday, to allow us to sail more directly downwind. However the pole is just too big and heavy and long, Catherine and I had it kind of working in a kludged sort of way before, under Neil's direction we tried to do it the right way, but it was so big, we gave up after a bit.
We are getting daily visits from dolphins, the pods are huge. I suppose, 200 plus miles from the African coast, and, according to our instruments, not another boat within a thousand square miles, we are probably as much of a novelty for them as they are for us. But you want to see them, coming towards us in their hundreds, splashing and cavorting on their way, many of them jumping clean out of the water, it is quite a display. Unfortunately they are long gone by the time we have gotten the camera out.
We got the towed generator back online on Saturday. We launched it when Catherine came up to relieve me at 9 a.m. It has been working fine since, except that it has a tendency to slide along the puishpit until it reaches something hard, and then starts to vibrate loudly. We've had to make several trips to the back of the boat to sort it, but it has been OK now for about 36 hours, so fingers crossed.
I'm still not convinced that it is giving us the 1 amp per knot that the manufacturers claim (and that other boats with the same piece of kit tell us they are getting), so I suspect I have something set up wrong. Despite 150 watts of solar panels, we are using more power than we are generating, so we might yet have to use the engine again to charge the batteries, especially if the wind dies off and we slow down. The main culprits for energy consumption are the automatic steering, the fridge and the navigation lights. Still, we're almost holding our own.
The sky at night over the ocean is amazing. No fear of light pollution out here. I spotted the Southern Cross the night before last. At first I thought I was imagining it, as we're still in the Northern hemisphere, but Catherine confirmed it in one of our Astronomy books last night. I went to point it out to Neil when I was taken over from his watch this morning, but he told me he had been steering by it for half the night.
That's another good thing about having Neil on board, he likes to steer. On a good day I might steer for fifteen minutes or so and leave the autohelm to it the rest of the time, but Neil will steer for hours, and the saving in battery power is noticeable.
Sailing wise we are making good progress. Right now we are about 250 miles NNE of Sal, our first intended stop in the Cape Verdes. We've been making a good 5 to 7 knots for the last two days, although we were becalmed for a couple of hours on Sunday. Eventually we ran the engine for an hour to stop the sails banging about, and also to put a bit of a charge into the batteries.
And I nearly forgot to say, we met another sailboat yesterday, "Maueve Piti", from Austria. We came within a few hundred yards of each other, chatted briefly on the VHF, and they gave us an updated forecast. Then we both gybed in opposite directions and we lost sight of them.
That's where we're at now. I probably won't be writing again until we reach the Cape Verdes.
Cheers!
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