What a difference a day makes!…..
19 October 2012 (Eastern Hemisphere)
Dear F&F,
We\’re just completing our second day at sea and surprisingly, we\’ll do around 170+ miles. I say surprisingly, because yesterday we had at least a one knot \”counter current\”. This is a phenomenon where the counter clockwise circulation of the Southern Hemisphere meets the clockwise circulation of the Northern Hemisphere. Intuitively, you would be led to believe that this should become synergistic and complement the prevailing west bound current.
But…you\’d be only partially correct. The world spins in mysterious ways and as such, there is a counter current which flows in the opposite direction. This is true in all the world\’s major oceans. We certainly found a branch of it yesterday as we were going almost a knot faster through the water than we were \”over the ground\” per our GPS. The seas certainly acted like it as well giving us a much more uncomfortable sea state than we would have expected for the approximately 15 knots of wind we had most of yesterday. We seem to be south of the counter current now as our speed over the ground is faster than our speed through the water AND the sea state is half what it was yesterday. The ride has become downright comfortable.
Our strategy is to maintain a southwesterly heading for about another day. This will get us close to the latitude of the top of Madagascar, around the Mascarene Banks (of very shallow water – we don\’t want to go over it as it could create steep waves) and keep us further south of the HRA…just in case! There is an island group called the Angalega\’s which looks to be uninhabited, but could be a safe haven for boats trying to \”hang around\” if you know what I mean. Hence, we\’ll stay roughly 100 miles to the south; remaining a needle in a haystack!
We move our clocks today to +5 UTC (We\’re now 5 hours ahead of England, 10 hours ahead of the US East Coast and 13 ahead of the US West Coast). We\’re almost at the half way point to being around the world from Los Angeles where this voyage began.
Lots of squalls last night, but more threatening looking than anything nasty. We flew the main with one reef and full genoa all night. Nikki gets to sleep in an extra hour with the clock change, so Captain and Crew are both happy this morning with the much more comfortable conditions.
We just cracked the \”1100 miles to go\” number on our log and it\’s official, we\’ve done 173 nm the last 24 hours. Love to hear from you,
KIT, Scott and off watch Nikki