Evening all,
It doesn't seem to matter what I do to get sleep it remains elusive. Last night I wrote about the fact that I was aiming on getting into bed at around 1am. This may seem late but it is in fact early for me. More often than not I have been able to see the first bluish tones of daylight before I even hop into bed. 1am was going to be a great head start only the boat had other ideas... The winds were constantly changing direction causing me to alter course 10 degrees this way or that and then the winds dropped out for a time causing me to need to fiddle with sails. Needless to say, it was almost sunrise by the time I got to bed, so I awoke again still not feeling that refreshed...
I decided given that it has been a week now since Cape Horn and my storm that I would treat myself to a me day... A day of not really thinking about the wind and the sails or doing the few maintenance jobs that are still left. Just a relaxing day where I can re-centre myself and take stock of what I have achieved and what is to come. I ended up reading some more of my book and then watching a movie. As you may remember I only have 12 videos on-board, so I have been spacing out my movie watching time and saving most of them for when I really needed them. Today was one of those days and I feel a lot happier having had my reset day.
That didn’t mean that I was able to get away with absolutely no sailing. When I got out of bed around lunch time the winds had dropped off from 16 knots in the night to 8 knots, so I needed to shake out the 1st reef and hoist the whole main sail. I also changed over the head sails so I was sailing with my largest sail the No 1 jib. That done it was breakfast time. Throughout the day the winds have been slowly veering from the SW to the W and then to a NW direction which is where they are blowing from at the moment, so I put in a gybe at 10pm my time.
Following that there is not much to report. The air temperature is 5 degrees and the water temperature is currently at 8 degrees. This is great, because I am currently sailing just to the North of the gap called Iceberg Alley. I have been watching the sea temperature for any sudden drops in temp. This can likely indicate Ice... I have also been keeping a close eye on the B and G 4 G radar and have the guard zones set on this just in case anything pops up while I am sleeping.
I am not at all worried about shipping as in Bobs (METBob) last weather report he said that there was only 1 passenger vessel near me and that it was a rather lonely piece of the ocean. I figure that the chances of me hitting the 1 vessel for hundreds of miles would be a long shot. Also, it is still 200nm away from me... I still haven’t seen a ship either on AIS, Radar or with my own 2 eyes so my rounding of Cape Horn aside I haven’t seen signs of human life in 58 days... There is every chance that the next vessel I see with be off Australia in 6 weeks’ time...
Goodnight.
#climateaction
#lisablair
