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Exody - Days 57 to 59 - "an area to be avoided"



So says the World ARC Cruising Notes about the 250,000 square mile area of Pacific Ocean that we and the rest of the fleet are making our way through! I have now had the time to re-read these notes carefully and it advises this large patch as having a reputation for frequent unsettled weather conditions. However we are all in the zone necessarily to catch the SE Trades, now filled in as we are south of 5 South but we have had one day of continuous squalls and resultant variable winds, then one of puffy cloud tradewind skies and then today a mixture of both and we haven't seen much of the sun!

It's great to still be on a broad reach and the last three days (Sunday 8th to Tuesday 10th) we have logged noon to noon runs of 183, 165 and 161 - ie an average of 7 knots. For the last two days we have had full sail up and winds have been a comfortable 10 to 15 knots. We are just six days in and by tomorrow will have passed the 1000 mile, third way, mark - only 2000 to go! The seas are relatively quiet, and completely empty - no mammalian life yet spotted, one fishing boat in the early morning distance today, one yacht light night before last. Flying fish - the bigger ones thudding the side of the boat as they knock themselves senseless, and sea birds, often hovering over our bow (we think to catch the flying fish taking off from our bow wave) are our only company.

Life on board is settling into a routine as the sunsets and happy hours seem to come round sooner each day. Following the mid-morning radio net, I always plot the positions and tracks on graph paper so we have our onboard 'Blue Peter' equivalent of the tracker you can all see on the website at the push of a button - always interesting to see how we are placed (330 miles behind lead boat and 190 miles ahead of the last at noon today) - but we have not had any boats within VHF or AIS range since the first 24 hours. I seem to find odd jobs to fill the day or keep watch on other folks' watches - whilst Marian and Petter find solid time for reading in between watches and galley duties. I aspire to read in due course! The fresh fruit, even the green/unripe ones, have started to ripen and our anticipation of Marian's banana bread yesterday were dashed when we discovered insect infestation in all our flour supplies - so it was banana porridge this morning in lieu!

Following Sunday's wall to wall grey skies, our batteries ended up rather low so we have deployed our towing generator - a simple device with a heavy propeller on a half metre shaft trailed on the end of a long rope attached to an alternator - it delivers a solid 5/6 amps (enough for the fridge and the instruments) but takes half a knot off our speed - does not sound much but equates to one to two extra days on a long passage like this - so it will be out the water when the sun is back out more solidly to feed our solar panels!

We have been able to email correspond with both of our daughters- one working in London and limbering up for the marathon, the other volunteering in India for six months and realise that we are now about as far away from each other as we possibly could be as a family! But it is good to be able to connect via the same 'bandwidth -challenged' SSB radio system that is submitting this blog.

Peter (Skipper)

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