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LOG ENTRY DATE: June 14, 2003 Still on the rhumb line for Horta. Have decided against sailing first to Flores, as it will require departing crew to find transportation to Sao Miguel from there—not always easy to do. Only other alternative was to stop for 2 nights, and then deliver them to S.M., but that seemed like too little time to do the island justice. No matter how you try to avoid them—even in this cruising mode—schedules have a way of imposing their will on you.... About 460 miles out... ETA looks like Tuesday (6/17) evening or Wednesday (6/18), depending upon winds and fuel supply. So far, we look pretty good: we're moving along at 5.5 knots.... although light winds are in the forecast tomorow, Monday and Tuesday are predicted to carry 20 knot winds, so I think we can afford to motor sail tomorrow, and even today if we slow down any more. Warm front came through this morning at 0400, just a Herb predicted. While attempting to reef the genoa, it folded on itself and wrapped up the sheets... took about 45 minutes to untie the sheets, unwrap the sail, and re-run the furling line and sheets—all in relatively high winds. Add to that another unplanned flying jibe, and the day's crisis was over and done with early on. Otherwise, the night was spent in what is now a typical pattern of 25-30 knot southwesterly winds... hand steering down quartering waves under a single reefed main and full genoa (like to get that speed when we can!). We've also got our own personal patterns down now... space-wise, I've taken over the port quarterberth ,while Mike has the starboard one. Tom resides on the port settee, and Jack on the starboard one. Mike and Tom share watches (when we do 2 man ones), and Jack and I hold down the other one. There's a funny sort of choreography that sets in as time goes on... besides having your own "turf" for sleeping, there are only so many places to travel on a small boat. Sitting places include only the nav station and the cockpit, really, since the bunks are filled with personal gear, sleeping bags, etc. If the weather is good, and no one is sleeping, the four of us usually congregate in the cockpit, books in hand. Or we converse, but if there's no reading or talk, no one is afraid of what are really companionable silences. Yesterday was the day of the dolphins. They joined us around 0500, about 25 strong. At first there were only a few, and then, if you looked off in the distance, you could see more and more of them, leaping out of the water as they headed for the boat. They joined us off and on for most of the day, entertaining us with their antics... we have several of them on film jumping fully out of the water, and smacking down sideways. They also performed their usual antics of racing the bow of the boat, criss-crossing underneath it and brusing it with their fins. While Jack has yet to prove his worth as a hunter-gatherer (fishing-wise), he has done well in the food preparation department. Yesterday's lunch was Bisquik biscuits, with ham and cheese baked inside. Today it was brownies, albeit mixed without any eggs. We are being well fed and well tended to, appropriately, as good morale is important for maintaining a properly functioning ship. Email continues to be the most frustrating of all the "boat" problems. Having spent decent sums (and lots of personal time installing) for a program that retrieves/sends email over the single side band, as well as over the satellite phone, I find myself with neither functioning. MarineNet, the company that provides the software, seems to have a problem with communicating with transmitters on the European side of the Atlantic—something they neglected to inform me of when I bought it, and the reason I installed it in the first place. Worse, the Iridium phone/modem doesn't seem to want to communicate with the laptop... it sits there blankly when I try to activate it to call out with email. It is a technology that seems to have a lot of self-proclaimed experts, though none of them can really provide answers or fixes to the problems... I shudder to think what that sort of situation would precipitate in our software business! Whole crew looking forward to arrival, even though it's still almost 4 days away. Funny the different perspective compared to sailing to Bermuda, where 4 days out means you just started the journey! |
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