We are currently in position 20 58S 004 09E and saillng at 5 knots on a course of 290M. The wind is SE at 10-12 knots with decreasing 1m sea and 1.5m SW swell. We are sailing under full main and yankee. Partly cloudy sky. Our day's run was 148nm and we have 635nm to go.
We had a great sail yesterday afternoon, albeit under an overcast sky. Our lovely boat trucks along at 7 knots with 20 knots of wind on her quarter. Overnight the wind decreased to 10-12 knots which slowed us down substantially. Banks of cloud came over and delivered a little drizzle but nothing major. Occasionally we got to see some stars which was very nice.
Our Iridium Go! was very busy last night since I had to email several large files of about 1MB each. Each took about 5 hours to transfer which equates to about 50 bytes/second. I expect Iridium frowns on the transfer of such large files and throttles them. Smaller files certainly transfer significantly faster - about ten times faster. The impressive thing is that the large transfers succeed at all. Even if one loses satellite coverage and the session is closed one can open a new session and the transfer continues from where it left off.
The flotilla of yachts enroute to St Helena now extends all the way from Cape Town to our destination. Here's a plot of their positions a while ago. Some of the boats have blogs with trackers like ours (google them). Just about all are transmitting on AIS so can be found using various satellite-AIS tracking web sites.
Nice to have company!
The good sailing conditions are allowing us to get a lot done. While Nic's been cooking I've been sorting out our music library. Before leaving Perth I recorded a large number of my parent's LPs, some of whiich are real classics. One MP3 file per LP side. I've been using the free Audacity app to clean them up, split them into named tracks and export them to iTunes. Amazing what one can get done at sea!
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