Tuesday 10th January 2017
The moon set in the early hours of the morning in a red glow, not unlike the sun, after providing some good light for the night’s sailing activities. Having light to sail by at night was a huge plus as it was very disorientating having total darkness around you with nothing to use as a reference point, especially when it was also overcast and you couldn’t use a star to line up the boat with. One then had to resort to watching the Fluxgate bulkhead-type compass on the chart plotter to keep the boat on the correct heading which could be very confusing after a while as you watched the Lubber line swinging to port or starboard.
We had just heard that both our matriculants on board, Nick and Albert, had obtained good results for their exams and were looking forward to going to Stellies to do engineering and taking a gap year respectively. Albert would be spending some time at the ski resort at Kandersteg in Switzerland as part of his gap year.
Looking at the daily position report from the race organisers we were pleased to see that we were holding our position relative to others in the first fleet and possibly gaining on one of them. We were also surprised that the racing boats in the 2nd fleet hadn’t passed us yet. Many of them seemed to be going straight across to Rio, aa luxury we couldn’t afford as our yacht just wallowed when the wind dropped off to less than 10 knots which is what the wind speeds looked like, and less, further south than our position. We seemed to be skirting the top of the high pressure, which is exactly where we wanted to be. And then just as we were discussing that maybe we would soon see one of those yachts sailing past us we saw something else sailing past us, but it wasn’t a yacht. It was a huge Sailfish about 50m off our port beam racing us through the swell, it’s body arcing up out of the waves and dorsal fin fully extended. The fish raced us for a good hundred metres before disappearing again. Shortly after this Max noticed a school of decent-sized tuna swimming out under the stern of the boat while he was taking a shower. Considering we had five fishing lines out and not a single bite for the last few days, yet there were clearly fish about, we decided to change all our lures. The Husky Magnum Rapala and the like that we had been using were possibly a bit too exotic for the fish in these waters so we switched to lures that were a bit more straight-laced in an attempt to land a nice fish as were all feeling like a bit of sushi and seared tuna steaks for supper.
The evening brought with it a gibbous moon by which we could more easily steer the boat in the light of although some squalls were also forming on the horizon behind us that we would need to keep an eye on during the night. We calculated that as were 15 degrees west now and needed to get to Rio on 43 degrees west but only 1 degree of latitude below us we needed to do 28×60 = 1680 miles. If we could maintain 150 miles a day it would take us 11 more days to get there and hopefully we could be in Rio on around about the 21st of January.
