Thursday 29th November 2012
A lovely sunny day with good Force 4 SE Trades blowing consistently - and no squall clouds in sight!! Very few clouds at all, in fact, over most of the day - it got very hot .... The wind seems to ease overnight and strengthen again over the morning - we've been making over 6kt for most of the day. Seas are not anything like as rough as they were a few days ago, but the swell is still up to 3m/10ft when the wind picks up, with the occasional bigger one coming by. Wind direction has been good - apart from a period of SE wind that saw us making SSW, we've ended the day heading just E of S (on 170T). The W-flowing current is still present and taking us W of our heading.
In the less strong seastate, I got the chance to get a few extra 'domestic' things dealt with, including checking over mandarins, turning eggs (as usual), reorganizing some packets of long-life milk and juices, and also some apples, cleaning, changing the batteries in the GPS tracker device .... and finally I had a very nice lunch of crab with finely chopped white cabbage and mayonnaise. I'd forgotten about the cabbage - it's become rather precious now (good and crunchy!) so I kept a small bit to one side, ready for a similar treat sometime soon! Later, I cooked an omelette with fried onion and diced potato - eggs are still fine simply with daily turning, having never been chilled but got fresh from the farm....
I've prepared for my mast-climb - dug out a good, deep bag to hold the new wind transducer, tools & bits and pieces I'll need, including a couple of cable ties - black! - to replace the broken white one. Checked my harness and safety lines, as well as the working of the gri-gri on the spinnaker halyard. I might have to go up in a slight swell since I can't see the seas lying down completely- so if I'm all ready and see it's fairly calm, I can heave to and go up and get both jobs done in a fairly short time, hopefully - neither job is complicated. No guarantee that changing over the wind vane assembly will solve the problem but we live in hope!! (I'll check the pins carefully and take some fine sandpaper in case they look corroded... Signals are getting to down below, so I'm hoping the short I've found is occurring within the transducer itself and not within the mast top connector that the transducer pins plug into...
Lovely bright moon. waning now... Jupiter still bright also...
24hr DMG at 3pm: 134 n.ml. Cape Horn LH 3809 n.ml.away & our nearest land is still Fatu Hiva, in the Iles Marquises of French Polynesia, 1110 n.ml.away, just S of due W from us. Galapagos Islands: 1758 n.ml. to the ENE, the Gambier Islands 1214 n.ml away to SW, Pitcairn to SSW, 1188 n.ml, and Easter Island to SSE, 1300 n.ml. There are a lot of little specks in this ocean! Fortunately, none of them should be close enough to cause me any undue worry... (BTW, I am not intending getting close to Cape Horn this time, but staying in the deeper water to the S. The LH at the Cape, which I saw at close quarters January year ago, just makes a convenient measuring point.) We're presently about 2320 n.ml. W of the coast of Peru .
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For my daily position and track:
See my website's 'Travels' page - go to www.svnereida, open 'Travels', then click on "Where is Nereida?"
http://www.exactearth.com/media-centre/recent-ship-tracks/tracking-nereida/ - courtesy 'exactEarth' using their polar-orbiting satellites - good everywhere, especially nearer the poles, i.e. should be good when in the Southern Ocean.
http://oceantracker.net?event=nereida - courtesy "Oceantracker' using geo-stationary satellites with good coverage until level with Valparaiso, Chile, probably.... Then coverage again from 1000ml WSW of Australia, onward to past New Zealand... (Batteries seem to have run out just after 17th Nov - have been replaced today, but not with the recommended type, so will be interesting to see if signals are now received or not).