10´11.1N 025´11.9W course 164´ speed 6,5
We have managed to stay under sail this whole day! Although our course has some east in it, which it should not, we haven filled the sails with the smallest breeze and kept her going as best we could in this confused swell. The wind has been very unstable throughout the day. We started off brilliantly with a force 4 breeze, on course doing 8 knots. Then the wind decreased and started backing and then veering again. So we kept changing the course with every shift. Right now we have a small breeze, probably around 11 knots, but a fairly steep wave running. Which means that going downwind (decreasing the wind over deck) becomes very rolly and uncomfortable. So we are on a course to fill the sails. The more South we make, the more East there will be in our wind. So that westing will be made any way.
During the day we started on our first celestial navigation lessons. Sharing knowledge and keeping ourselves entertained. We have two sextants on board and Mark has brought his own, so lots of possibilities to try. It was our first try and so most of the time was spend explaining and then just having a look through the sextant. The rolling of the ship made it difficult to get a good reading, but it did give a very accurate depiction of how amazing this skill is. I love working with the sextant and explaining how the calculus works, just because it encompasses so much! It is also just general knowledge about history, about the earth and why things are the way they are. Like time zones, the sun moving over the earths surface, but the earth actually revolving around the Sun. That we have an ellipse orbit around the sun, that we are sometimes pulled around the sun faster and that there were men like Kepler who already noticed this and made physics laws around this hundreds of years ago! That we made clocks work better so we could navigate the world seas, that seamen were able to find their way back to the smallest islands in badly charted waters and that they did this without calculators, computers or GPS.
The first three volunteers to try were, in Latitude, so hight measurement, only off by respectively 3,6 miles, 11 miles and 13 miles. It was the time that was the biggest fault… In Latitude we would have found Picairne Island, but in Longitude we would have missed it by 70 miles! Ah well, tomorrow is another day and we try again! We have enough days ahead of us in this voyage to learn and steady the hands that hold the instrument.
In the meantime the warmth on board is getting to the vegetables and the banana’s. So we have sliced and diced them during the evening watch. Floris and Moritz went for it and now our freezer is filled with bags of cut carrot and banana. Soete makes a little basket every evening, with all the vegetables that need to be used soon. So by the morning I can walk by the galley and see what the ingredients are for the evening and thus plan our dinner. Our system works very well, last night we only had a few things that needed to go and mostly tomatoes, so we had Pannisi, italian risotto rice with bacon, chorizo, tomatoes and some beans to make it nice and filling.
All is warm and well on board,
Jet
