We're now well and truly settled into the trade wind conveyor belt, its remarkable!! Steady, strong breeze from the East at between 15 and 25 knots, gusting to 30 at times so the sea has built up to quite large lumps, 4 - 5m swells rumbling through every 10 seconds, approaching from the NE (over our right shoulder). So the job of steering Free Spirit is great fun, we're taking it in hour turns as its quite tiring, we have two reefs in and are cruising at 8 - 10 knots v. Comfortably, surfing the swells as they come through (which can get us into the 12 knot area when we've caught one!). The attached map shows the weather charts we've been getting twice daily from the Bluestone team in Aus. These charts come from
www.weatheronline.co.uk, which is a comprehensive site showing output from a number of the major met computer models, and forecasting out a week in 6 hour increments. The wind indicators point in the direction of the wind (the Trade Wind belt is pretty obvious!!) and the number of tails tells the strength - a half = 5 knots, a whole tail is 10, so two whole tails is 20 knots (and the colour changes). So we're in a zone of winds that has served mankind for hundreds of years, and I'm sure the historical route would be to do as we've done, swoop down south and pick up the strong, consistent belt of easterlies to speed across!
Nature notes - Whales!! If you've been following this blog you'll have detected we don't have a biologist on board, so all we can say is that we saw around 8, they were small whales but very clearly larger than dolphins, and they had a large, very rounded curvy fin on their back. And they were dark grey! Unlike dolphins they didn't stick around and play, if anything they made a reasonably quick passage past us, we narrowly missed sailing through their pod in fact! We've also seen the smallest dolphin breed we've seen on this trip, and last night we had 4 flying fish on deck and one in the galley (we think he came down the companionway, poor fellow!). Still more shooting stars mostly travelling NW, a couple of long, tumbling and impressive ones.