Reading: Us Against You (Frederick Backman) (finished) & An Unsung Hero (Michael Smith)
Weather: NE 2-4 – variable. A bit more of an awkward swell and 100% cloud ….
Thought for the day: The Dutch name for noughts and crosses is butter, cheese and eggs – should we be a little more creative with our naming of games?
Evening meal: Spaghetti Bolognese and salad
Course: 175-185oC
Distance covered: At 1200 we had done 3,058 miles
Wildlife headcount: A lone masked booby …..
Today has been another rock and roll day. Somehow the seas and swell just don’t seem to be on the same page as the wind – almost as if the weather was organised by a committee which couldn’t quite agree. This means that occasionally we have a stable period and then we hit a run of swells which knock us about all over the place, making it difficult to do much more than hang on for a minute or so. Then repeat, but with small variations ….
We are still heading roughly south and the wind has been slowly backing to the north, so we are now on a broad reach, the aim being to gybe, probably in a day or so, to start heading west towards Rio de Janeiro. Our destination – Isla Grande – is a bay close to the west of Rio. We have stayed offshore to avoid a developing low pressure system which was meant to be tracking along the coast. However, this seems about as decisive as the Brazilian electorate and recently changed its mind and headed offshore though rapidly dissipating. It may be that the cloudy weather is related to this weather system, but the weather reports have varied.
These weather reports come in via SailMail. This is a satellite email system and Jet requests a Grib file for a certain range of coordinates. This comes through the email and is then displayed as an overlay in OpenCPN. She adds a routing on top of this to help analyse the best place to be in at the best time. This does currently make it look like we should hold this kind of breeze (12-18 knots from the N-NE) into Rio, but the weather has been anything but predictable and the weather reports for this area seem to once again be related to the reliability of results in Brazilian elections!
It is Sunday again today, so the Sunday evening routine kicks in at watch changeover – a beer for us all together. A nice chance to catch up and chat all together.
