Day 4 - Saturday - April 10, 2010
UTC/GMT: 0340 UTC, 2040 Local
Latitude: 19 07.275 N
Longitude: 108 50.206 W
Conditions:
It's another starlit night with a few clouds along the horizon. It's 78 degrees and 62% humidity. The wind is blowing about 10 knots and the ocean swells are about six feet, very broad and 12 -14 minutes apart. It's a perfect evening, although a little more wind would be nice. I'm sitting in the upper saloon with both of the cabin doors and skylight open. I am technically on watch, but Russ is up with me for awhile. We are currently motoring and charging our batteries. In an hour, we'll turn off the motor, and set the sails for the evening ride, then Russ will retire. Garyn is sleeping and will take over at 2:00 a.m.
Just as the sun went down on Friday night, a boobie and two frigate birds started circling the boat looking for a place to roost. We pulled out the laser pen and were successful for a while shining it at them and preventing them from landing. However, the booby wasn't as stupid as it looked and eventually figured out that if he landed and tucked his head down and didn't look at the laser he would be alright. So he sat on the mast, right on the windex spinning around all night. Garyn was able to keep the frigates off the mizzen for a while, but eventually one of them wised up, landed and didn't seem to care about the red laser anymore. Both birds got a free dry ride all night and rewarded us with poop all over the decks. Garyn got a tired arm and a stiff neck.
It was my night off, so I got to sleep through Friday night. Garyn had the 9-2:00 a.m. watch and Russ had the 2:00-7:00 a.m. watch. The boat had a little wind, and I knew we were happily moving forward under main, mizzen, and jib. At some point in my dreams. I thought I heard voices during Russ's watch, and thought it was Garyn and Russ. Turns out I was hearing voices, but not what I thought.
Russ was on watch and about 4:00 a.m. noticed an AIS (automated information system) target on our navigation screen. We receive AIS transmissions from most commercial ships and many private vessels that alerts us of their course and direction. It logs their marine identifier and displays for us pertinent information such as their name, vessel size, speed, home port, destination, compass heading and bearing, It was a large Japanese tanker coming towards us at 20 nautical miles and hour and our paths were due to intersect within 500 yards. Way to close for comfort. Captain Russ called the tanker on the radio and had a conversation with their bridge. He told them who he was, name of our vessel, position and course, and asked if the tanker could see us? The responder on the bridge must have put Russ on standby and then reported that he did see us….Russ wasn't sure if it was by radar or visual and the radio operator had limited English. The radio operator reported, "I see you, stand your course. I change course." With that, Russ could see that the course bearing for the tanker changed 10 degrees, and they intersected our path several miles away, well in front of us.
When I finally got up in the morning, Garyn and Russ were flying our new gennaker and with 10 knots of consistent 10 knot wind on our beam, we were moving at 4.5 knots! So far that's the record speed for this windless trip. If we hadn't had the gennaker we would have only been moving about 2-3 knots. Most of the morning we had a great wind, then it died out and was wimpy-puffy most of the afternoon. The barometric pressure has been rising from 1012 yesterday, to 1017 this morning and 1018 this afternoon.
Other than our friends the birds, we didn't really see any other wildlife today, not even our pet gecko. After a few chores, we spent the day trying to catch the wind, reading, listening to the audio book, The Fountain Head, and music. Garyn practiced guitar and later we had a late afternoon game of dominoes while pork chops and broccoli au Gratin baked in the oven. We saw another sailboat on the horizon as the sun was descending. We think it was our friend on Aquila, but didn't get any response from any vessel when we hailed them on the VHF on channels 16 and 22. We subscribe to YOTREPS Summary so that we can see the positions of all of the other sailboats on the puddle jump. We have a little YOTREPS reporter program that plots all of the data on a map for us. The only problem is that the boats are all identified by their marine call signs which are not easily recognizable. Ours is WDD8707. So it takes awhile for us to decipher who is who and their position relative to us.
There are two puddle jump nets that we try to listen to. We have not been very successful hearing the evening net and have had more luck in the morning. Since we don't want to run down our batteries, if we don't hear something within the first five minutes, we turn off the radio.
The highlight of our day is getting email via our single side band radio. We are basically alone, so it's nice to hear some occasional news from family and friends. Just remember to keep messages reasonably short with no attachments. The radio wave propagation in this part of the Pacific is not very good. There are only a few times during the day when we can send and receive information at a reasonable speed. 0100 and 1700 GMT. We may choose only one of those times to send and receive. Since everyone is in a different time zone and we will be changing zones, we use GMT as our standard.
As I close out this update, Russ, Garyn, the boobie on our mast and the gecko somewhere on the navigation desk are sound asleep. The stars are twinkling, the water is lapping past our sides as a gentle breeze carries us into the night.
All is well on Worrall Wind.
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