Day 20 – Friday 24 January.

By Grant Chapman.

After a good start to the day with decent winds we started getting only 5 knots of wind again and were wondering if we were ever going to get to Rio when the wind picked up again and we managed to achieve a total of 114 nautical miles for the day, which although less than we needed was better than we expected. We continued to sail on good winds into the night and were hoping they would stay with us, as the GRIB files we had downloaded indicated.

We also experienced very patchy reception on the Satphone and our Satellite modem frustratingly kept on connecting but didn’t manage to download any of our e-mails or GRIBS as our e-mail and GRIB file software kept on timing out with data transfer rates of less than 4 Bytes per second. The fact that both devices were battling indicated some sort of interference in the atmosphere. We couldn’t even connect late in the evening so ruled out a problem with solar activity.

We set about planning sightings of the stars and planets in the evening and calculated civil twilight to be occurring at 19:49 Zulu which as it turned out was spot on. We had a whole foolscap page full of calculations with Greenwich Hour Angles (GHA), declinations and azimuths all worked out for our estimated longitude and latitude (actually we knew this accurately off the GPS but for this exercise rounded it to the nearest degree only), together with their multitude of corrections, for the 4 planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as well as the stars Aldebaran and Canopus, all of which the almanac said would be in our night sky at our chosen time. The Geographical Positions (GPs) of the stars were determined relative to the GHA (or first point) of Aries, their distances from each other in the universe being so massive that for all intents and purposes they were static. Come twilight we started shooting the stars with one person holding the hand-held compass and another on the sextant but soon realized that we had a problem because Jupiter wasn’t at a Local Hour Angle (LHA – the GHA less our assumed longitude position) of 3070 13’ but more like 230. Trying to find the error in the calculations in the dark on what had become a very bumpy sea and the wind having picked up to 16+ knots proved very trying and we abandoned the exercise until the morning. At least tomorrow evening there wouldn’t be a big difference in the various planets’ and stars’ positions and a fudge factor could be applied to them to update their positions for the new day.

Speaking of fudge factors we seemed to have a new nom de mer for one of our crew members. Considering our need to clock up some good miles on each shift we had a competition running to see which shift could generate the most miles. At the end of Marcus and Ashwyn’s shift Ashwyn went down below to the nav station to log the miles and record the various other metrics such as barometric pressure etc. on the hour. Cathleen noticed Marcus fiddling around at the chart table just after his shift and couldn’t resist inspecting the log book to see what he had been doing to discover that Ashwyn’s entry of 2865 miles for the distance travelled at the end of their shift had been adjusted to 2866. Marcus fessed up to the indiscretion in the morning and acquired his new title of First Mate Fudge Factor.

We managed to make contact with the Coordenação Nacional dos Escoteiros do Mar de Brazil, i.e. the National Commissioner for Sea Scouts in Brazil, a Mr Andre Torricelli F. da Rosa thanks to Adrian Velaers who had been working hard in the background organizing for us to meet with him. We considered it a great opportunity to show off our newly learnt Portuguese and sent Mr da Rosa the following response with apologies to both him and other native Portuguese speakers for mistreating their language:

Caro Andre

Muito obrigado por sua correspondência. Estamos ansiosos para conhecê-lo no Rio de Janeiro e introduzir nossos olheiros para alguns de vocês. Desculpas para o meu Português como estou ocupado aprendendo.

Vamos deixá-lo saber quando vai chegar no Rio, quando nós somos um dia longe. Temos organizado habilitação de segurança para você no iate clube.

Atenciosamente

Peter e escoteiros