Theodora - 2/11

The quieter winds did arrive as forecast which resulted in a much quieter night, however that means we spent time fiddling with the rig to stop it flapping around. Yesterday we covered 174 nms which bought our cumulative total to just over 1,000. At 13:00 today we will have completed seven days at sea and averaged a little over 170 nms a day.

As the miles drift by we keep trying to add a little bit more westerly in our course and to date this seems to be working for us. We are hoping to find a stream of more easterly air in a couple of days time when we will be close to the same latitude as St Lucia.

Again there is no sign of any other boat or shipping around us and very little sign of wildlife either. The only things we see on a daily basis is the odd flying fish which has landed on our decks.

We are getting to the end of our fresh fruit with only some grapefruits and oranges occupying the rather empty looking fruit hammocks. We started our advent calendars yesterday and fortunately it hasn’t been sufficiently warm to melt the chocolate. There was a bit of a debate this morning over breakfast (scrambled eggs, beans, mushrooms and bread rolls) over where the Mars bar cake 9kindly produced by Sophie) was hidden and wether we should tuck into that or the Biltong ( kindly produced by Rosa). A compromise was reached and we agreed we will attack both.

As the halfway mark approaches we have been mulling over where the halfway mark is, broadly there are three options. Firstly there is the distance travelled mark, ŵe expect our route to be about 2900 nms so 1450 would be the halfway mark, we will reach this either late on the 3/12 or early on 4/12. Another way to look at it would be to pick the longitude that sits halfway between St Lucia and the Canaries, this would be the 38th longitude and that’s a good two day away for us. The third way would be on the basis of time, however since we don’t have a clue how quickly or slowly we will sail the rest of the way we have discounted that approach. You can see we have a lot of time on our hands....

We finally decided that we would celebrate halfway tomorrow at 6pm, local time, when we will share some Damzon Vodka kindly supplied by Edward.

One of the more curious features of the trip has been watching Geoff mater the art of astronavigation, well at least I think that’s what it’s called. This is a three step process, the first involves Geoff holding the sextant to his eye and muttering incomprehensible words as a form of commentary. This phase has reduced in length and it now seems to take him about fifteen minutes, at the start of the journey it was a lot longer. The second phase is the calculations. Here he departs to the saloon with books of tables and charts and spends a good hour muttering to himself as he adjusts for this and that in his calculations. And then, with great relief, there is the third and final stage when a result is achieved. The first result a week ago was about twenty five miles out, which all of us on board thought was pretty good given the scale of the place. This did not satisfy Geoff and now claims that he gets it to within five miles. He seems very pleased with his progress.

End