Day 6 – 27°24.23S 000°16.38E
14 September 2013 – Total Distance Covered: 1122nm
Spent most of the day with headwinds… We have the donkey (diesel engine) running at low revs but we’re still sailing with a substantial amount of sail up.
We still haven’t caught any fish and are trying different lures and lengths of line. Catching fish in the Atlantic is a, excuse the pun, catch 22. You’re unlikely to catch a small Tuna, so you end up with a huge bloody mess on deck and then days of tuna for breakfast, lunch and dinner… Still, fresh tuna sashimi and ceviche are very good.
I installed the 4 ICOM VHF handhelds today which involved some soldering and wiring in the new back panel. Cleaned up some other 12v wiring with the help of Chris the engineer.
Magnus made chicken for dinner, which was amazing. Speaking of chicken, it’s worth mentioning that chicken is often a rarity at sea because very few vessels have freezers, certainly not the rough and touch expedition yachts. We’re lucky in that we have a temporary deep freezer on board from a previous season’s Antarctic science group doing ice core sampling.
One of the interesting things about travelling at sea (ie. slowly) is that you gradually creep through time zones. You’ll notice from our latitude and longitude that we’re nearing 0 degrees longitude, which is also the international date line, or Grenich Meridian etc. For every 15 degrees of longitude we cross we lose or gain an hour. Obviously there is no real need to do this because it’s just us on board and it’s not like we have dinner appointments to get to on time, but we do have to continually adjust or we will arrive way out of sync with the rest of the world. We usually do the changeover during dinner when most people are awake. The boat therefore has what we call “local time”, which is what we use for all our shifts, but all the log entries are done in UTC (which time nerds will go to great lengths to explain is not the same as GMT). I do find it quite hubris that we have a Universal time… I wonder if any other life forms inside our universe are dutifully resetting their clocks based on our odd planet’s spin rate.
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