Day 5 – Thursday 9 January 2014.

By Grant Chapman.

We have sunshine again, a mild sea and fair south south east winds at 16 knots, as we had predicted from the sunset the night before. We goose-winged the genoa out on the pole in a following sea. Mark told us via SATphone that we were now in 4th place on handicap in our division. We assumed this is because we had gone north while the others had gone west. We were comfortable with this as it had always been our intention to avoid the lack of decent wind in the middle of the high pressure and our barometric pressure having increased to 1020hPa meant that we definitely needed to stay north if the high pressure also looked like it was moving north. We put out another 2 fishing lines on bungees and squid lures set on the wake behind the boat. We saw our second ship steaming north on the horizon to the west of us, our second since leaving the fleet on our first night. Cathleen had another radio interview with Radio MFM about the race progress and her matric results. Marcus fiddled for quite a while with the Sailor satellite modem device network connection and discovered it had disabled itself. After re-enabling it we were back online and we had our satellite email communication as well as the ability to receive our all-important GRIB files again. We wasted no time in downloading the latest GRIB files and imported them into our weather routing application on our waterproof Sony Experia Android tablet which allowed us to analyse which route to take for the optimum wind conditions. We have provided a screenshot with this blog entry of the GRIB files we received for the coming Monday which clearly show the high pressure having moved north by then and necessitating our need to stay north to avoid the very low wind speeds at the centre of the high. Our boat position is also shown (in green) together with our desired track (in red), the end of which is our anticipated position on Monday. In the late afternoon we dropped the spinnaker and reverted to the genoa goose-winged as we were worried that strengthening winds would make the spinnaker unmanageable, especially on the night shifts when people were tired and the wind was more flukey with a heavy swell picking up. Our steering bearing was 3000M