Monday, 1st November 2010
There is a Cyclone building around the Cocos Islands, and looks like being a category 3. This is a strong Cyclone, and has not been seen in this area for a long time. It seems that the Cyclone season has arrived early with a bang, all because of the "Indian Ocean Dipole" which is similar to "El Nino" which we have all heard of over the years. The waters of the ocean are warmer than normal and therefore cause the weather in general to be erratic, and this in turn also affects the currents, which we know all about. Right now we have a 3.2 knot current against us, where as normally here the current would be with us, pushing us along nicely.
01.00hrs Big clouds appear from the SW, bringing with it lots of rain and stronger winds, all hands on deck and we reefed all sails. The wind shifted from the NW to West and then SW all in the space of 30 minutes, now right on the nose, just bleeding lovely!
07.00hrs We could see two of our own fleet close by, later it turned out that these were Ariane and Tzigane. We had a lot of shipping traffic all night, and apart from the heavy shower, it was a nice night at sea.......
09.00hrs Radio Call. We got the position of all yachts, and we have recovered our position towards the front of the fleet.
The conditions remained beautiful, except the wind was in the wrong direction for us all, dead on the nose. This makes for slow progress.
11.00hrs Distance traveled................................320 miles
Distance to waypoint............................229 miles
Lunch time. The barometry has dropped to 1010 the food was a Prawn and Avocado salad, with hard boiled eggs, spring onions, cucumber, celery, lettuce, grapes, and olives, plus some of Aileens boat made brown bread, and of course the marie rose sauce, yum, yum!
Entertainment. The fishing rod was working away on its own at the back of the boat, while the rest of the crew played "backgammon." We altered course a number of times to keep within a reasonable distance of the rum line, and did a couple of hours motorsailing as well.
Later in the day, the wind increased to 25/30 knots fine on our port bow, so we got some good sailing for a while. The winds have shifted around more or less as Bruce predicted, but we have much more wind than he forecast, the positive side to that is we have much more sailing than expected.
Around dusk, the fishing rod went bonkers again, ha,ha we got you this time, with our wire trace, there's no escape. Well, that's what we thought, but, BUT, thoughts can make a fool of you, and they did, 30 mins later, the fish was gone again. Ohhhhhh noooooo and with the lure as well, can you believe that, the begger ate the wire trace, just like as if it was cut off with a pliers, no frayed ends.
Aileen cooked dinner, a lamb and beef spaghetti dish which we ate in the Moonlight Restaurant and it was excellent (have to say that anyway!). All this took up a good part of the evening.
21.00hrs The wind eased off again, so we shook out the reefs, tightened up the sails and altered course 20 degrees south. The seas were very flat and it looked as if we will have a good night at sea again.
That's all for today,
Signed :- Stephen Hyde (Skipper)