Cleone - CLEONE Leg 17 Day 5 - Freshening Winds

At times, the wind and weather become of all-consuming interest.

 

And the last twenty four others has been one of those times.  It all started with Bruce's forcast, which arrived when we down-loaded our e-mails yesterday.  Because he needs to predict for the entire fleet, it is difficult for him to give specific routeing advice, apart from encouraging us to stick to or go above or below the Rhumb Line.  And this gives us an immediate difficulty, does he mean the Rhumb Line or the Great Circle Route?  Our magic GPS gives us the latter, which is shorter, but we have no Gnomic (Great Circle) chart for the Indian Ocean, so we are taking it on trust that the GPS is correct (it has not let us down yet), whilst keeping track of our progress on a Mercator Chart.  But what about those folk with Chart Plotters?  If they set up a route, particularly a long one, will it be a Great Circle Route or a Mercator Route?  Who knows, but out of curiousity the Skipper would like to find out.

 

I digress; back to Bruce's normally spot-on forecast.  Yesterday he not only advised going south of the Rhumb Line, but also he gave us a specific latitude to get south of, in this case 15 degrees and 30 minutes, and further south for those near the back of the fleet, which we are.  So yesterday afternoon we changed course, and began making our way further southwards.  This coincided with a rapid increase in the windspeed, so the third reef went into the main (Alex's first foredeck solo), the genoa was all but rolled away and the mizzen reduced down to its slim second reef.   We still shot along at seven knots, and by this morning we were down at the magic 16th parallel, and coincidently the wind has eased slightly.  We hope we are further enough south to avoid the worst of whatever is on the way, and we have turned slightly to starboard and are headed once more directly towards Mauritius.  Bruce also talked mysteriously about "disorganised tropical circulations" to the north, providing up to gale-force winds on their periphery.  We await his next forecast with interest!

 

Other boats have taken similar avoiding action, and those faster boats that left a day after us are now almost upon us and within VHF range; they will be past us soon.  But they are reporting bumpy rides and pocket handkerchiefs of sail and a lack of sleep.  We've had a bit of a bumpy ride, but Cleone's weight and long keel allows her to slide more comfortably over and down the waves, and Norfy and Alex have manged to push out their usual undisturbed spells of Zeds, leaving the Skpper to do the worrying and to read a Jilly Cooper novel in his quieter moments (hasn't he got better things to do with his time? - Ed).  But we survived the Skipper's Beef Stew, his bread again looks good and the magic Alex is duty chef tonight.  Despite the forecast, things could be worse!

 

It's been more classic trade-wind sailing (again) and we are another 163 miles to the good.