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Athena of Southampton - Athena log 10



Today again we greeted the morning with good coffee as the sunrise revealed a very grey and confused sea. We’ve been flying along at between 7.5 and 9.5 kts with the occasional squall requiring us to get a quick reef in only to shake it out soon after to maintain speed. We are really clocking off the miles to St Lucia now. It’s been fantastic sailing in the moonlight with glimpses of stars between the clouds while all night making steady speed. Now that the dawn has arrived we can see our true speed in the wake as we rise and surge forward with the sea on our quarter. Sanding with head above the sprayhood is like riding a runaway train as we surge forward. Yesterday we watch an intensely blue sea build small mountains of blue and white, works of art almost and then destroy them in an instant and build more – waves as art frozen in time by a camera. Is it possible to capture it all? I’ve found over the years that I’ve never been able to quite get the power of it onto film / video tape / SD cards, whatever!!


Yesterday we joined with group B for the SSB net as we’ve been unable to raise C for the past week. It’s really good to plot the surrounding ARC yachts, despite the distances, and hear their local weather. With ARC emails, GRIB downloads and emails from Muiris (our Ground Control) we are well informed.


So what or who is Athena Ground Control? Muiris DeBuitleir is a Dublin based sailor and expert navigator. He operates our support base (Ground Control ... to Major Tom etc.!) and circulates updates to family and friends, condenses emails he receives from them (to optimise Sat time) and of course gives us positional information from Yellowbrick observations. He also provides data from Passage Weather. We all look forward to his despatches.


Muiris’s passion, aside from sailing is maps. Maps, Charts everything in that age old scientific art of cartography. In fact he has just published his book “A Portrait of Dublin in Maps", (published by Gill & MacMillan, available on the web) so his expertise is now shared in print! Imagine the interest he has in a tool like Yellowbrick!


Daily we compare our progress, with help from Muiris, and that of Misfa our sister ship (the other Ocean Start 56.1 on the ARC). Modesty forbids I mention the position of Misfa just now. Suffice it to say that Muiris’s comment – “Now you're suckin' diesel!!!” (when clearly we are not using any) refers to our performance over the last few days. In fairness Misfa she was detained in Cape Verde with repairs and is moving very well now. She has a superior downwind rig so we expect her to narrow the ; It would be very nice to have the bandwidth to view the Yellowbrick screen from time to time.


So now the sun is well up and the decks are drying out, people are making breakfast and even hanging out washing – brave with that following sea! We’ve less than 700 miles to go and time has passed so quickly. The days blend one into the other, don’t anybody mention Christmas; just yet!



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