Cara of the South - Day 5

23:03.69N 20:49.12W Midday Position Day 5 Thursday 28th November

Well the dolphins have gone and a good thing too. All they do is arse around all day and waste your time. You see the problem is this, they will only appear above the surface for the shortest measurable piece of time, imagine the time it takes for a green traffic light to appear before a Greek taxi driver sounds his horn. This is the equivalence in time it also takes for a dolphin to burst forth from the sea, pirouette over the bow and then disappear in to the murky depths. All day long you are compelled repeatedly to reach for your camera, phone or paint and easel only to be greeted with disappointment as you review a flat sea without a dolphin in sight. They know this of course which is why when someone comes aboard and squeals excitedly 'ooh dolphins' I say f**k em. And they don't eat bananas.

On to sailing and we are a good 500+ miles in and all I can say is thank God for the Yanmar marine diesel engine, please please please don't break. I have no interest in hanging around at 3 knots so burn the diesel we will both freely and with abandon, we bought enough of it just for this. We do want to sail of course but that's not looking likely til Saturday or Sunday and then hopefully we'll have a sleigh ride all the way to St. Lucia.

I should give an update on the astro navigation which is going on daily with mixed results. Had I been a normal person I would have brought some reliable equipment but I had to be daft and nostalgic. My chronometer is
from a 1942 US battleship, the walker log will soon celebrate its 100th birthday and God knows what year the sextant comes from that Stokey sold me but lets just say the registration card was written with a quill pen. To be
honest the sextant is perfect with no index error but the others have their own little discrepancies which I have to build in to the vast amount of already complicated enough mathematical calculations. Day one I was out by
74 miles (found a one degree error so in the end was 14 miles), day 2 - 26 miles and today just 6.8 miles, I am finally getting the extra calculations working and tomorrow I hope to find we are a couple of hundred miles north
west of Cape Verdes about to turn west.

David is being a top bloke and really helpful and more importantly encouraging about the Astro navigation as I would have thrown the whole lot in to the Atlantic if he hadn't spurred me on with it.

Onwards!!!