Thursday, 7th October 2010 (Day 11 at Sea)
Destination :- Mauritius ...........Total distance from Cocos Islands to Mauritius............... 2,313 miles
Distance remaining.........................................................419 miles
Weather.................good, Sun, clear skies, and 16 / 20 knot breeze
Sea's.....................................................................................Flat
We had a great night sailing, white sails only, on a broad port reach, so we all got a good nights sleep. We passed just one ship, and she was 12 miles away at the nearest point.
09.00hrs Radio Call :- This was conducted by Drammer again. They have a very good radio system on board. We are still making ground on the whole fleet. We know that the official leg (and race) was abandoned by W. ARC, but we are pushing our lovely Oyster 56 hard in an effort to catch up with some of the boats that left 2 days early. So far, we have passed most boats in the fleet, and out of the 20 boats sailing this leg, there are only 4 boats now in front of us. We may pass at least 1 more, and with a bit of carefull sailing, might pass one more. It is unlikely that we will catch up with Tucanon or Crazy Horse but we will finish within a few hours of them reaching Mauritius, and that will be good enough for us. All this keeps us focused, and therefore well occupied day and night in between naps, reading, and food which is always the main event of the day. We covered 190 n miles in the last 24 hrs, which is ok.
10.00hrs We hoisted the "Bag of fear" again and just took off across a beautiful deep blue sea towards Mauritius, and the sea was flat, well by comparison to other days... Shortly after this, the instruments alarms started ringing, rubbish! what's all this? Suddenly all the waypoints on the computers vanished, along with a lot of information regarding distances, currents, drifts, etc. However we are getting used to these unxpected events, so we set about reseting everything and within 15 minutes, we were all set again....
BLOG:- A few months ago, according to Mailasail, statistics showed our blog in 4th place in terms of readership, Skipper worked hard at increasing the readership, and today we have moved up to 2nd place and just behind "Vulcanspirit" and we appear to have the most diverse readership of all blogs.
Well done to all our readers, and with a little more from you and your families, kids, aunts and uncles, grannies, friends, work mates, college students, lecturers, doctors, nurses, etc. We will make it to No 1 position before the end of the year. So, give them the Blog address......
http://blog.mailasail.com/alady
It also seems that a large number of the readers are non sailors, and follow us every day around the globe, and enjoy almost living with us.
In the afternoon, we passed Rodrigues Island, which is part of the Mauritius group. One interesting here is in 1977 the locals found a 12m yacht drifting off the coast of their Island. The Polish built "Admiral Nevelskoi" had been abandoned 3 years earlier off the coast of Australia. The owner and skipper decided to abandon the yacht after he lost his rudder and then the mast, decided to make a raft and took off, leaving the damaged, but floating yacht to the mercy of the sea. Leonid Lysenko, was lucky to be picked up by a ship after drifting for 25 days, and yet the boat survived another 4,000 miles and 3 years at sea. Now, the moral of this story is:- never leave your ship, untill it is slipping under the waves. Always step UP into your life raft....
Now, Prayer is a powerfull thing, but there is a story going about this guy at sea in his boat and he runs straight into a tropical storm. In danger of sinking, he prays to God: "Oh God, this is your friend in need, I know I have not been in touch with you for years, but, BUT, please get me out of this fix, and I promise I wont bother you again for another few years" I wonder if he was Polish! Mind you, this would apply to many of us all, eaten bread is soon forgotten.
18.00hrs Distance to destination..............................346 miles (we covered 188 miles since 18.00hrs yesterday)
Dinner was roast turkey leg and rolled stuffed chicken, with pasta and carrots, all very good. We spent ages plotting and discussing the merrits of leaving the "Bag of Fear" flying for the night, and we left it up for the night and had a great nights sail.
That's all for now.
Signed :- Stephen Hyde (Skipper)