Tuesday May 8th. 2018, 1000 h. local time
Position 35.31.088 N 054.59.728 W
We have been under way for almost three days and have covered 520 nautical miles. 1154 Nm to go before we reach Flores on the Azores.We are travelling through an area of high pressure, the barometer reading a constant 1029 mB. The sun is shining and there are cumulus clouds.The wind is a light to moderate Southerly, more or less from behind us, blowing in our favour. Not to the liking of the sailing boats that left Bermuda with us. Looking for more wind to take them to the Azores, they have sailed a more Northerly course and we have lost sight of them.
Our course is a sraight line, following the great circle route to Flores. We have to follow the shortest route to cross the ocean with the fuel we have on board.
I will elaborate on this in a later post.
We are to all intents and purposes alone on this infinite ocean. In the distance we see a single ship, with little information on its AIS signal; no name, neither where it came from nor where it is headed to. We can see that it is 170 feet long and 50 wide and that it is constantly changing course, maybe a factory ship looking for a school of fish.
What else have we seen? Two living creatures.
A smiling dophin that shot back and forth under the boat, left to right, then right to left for a quarter of an hour until it thought of something better do do and dissapeared as quickly as it had appeared.
And a beautiful white bird. Where does it come from and what does it eat? All alone out here, I think he’s a tern. In Dutch we’d call him a ‘visdief – fish thief’.
Why I think this? Because this fare out to sea it’s unlikely to be a vegetarian bird, let alone a carnivore, so that leaves fish as a diet and the only fish eating bird I know of other than a heron is the ‘fish thief’. And he’s certainly not a heron.
If I’m wrong I trust that our ornithological weblog readers will put me straight.
As we have no internet aboard please reply to the website editor. All suggestions, comments and questions to the crew are welcome.
(We screen all comments, we’re not Facebook)
On the subject of food …
Mission control in Groningen has advised us to limit our use of electricity because of the faulty alternator. A replacement will have to wait until we are in the Azores. Until then the Panda generator is fired up when we need to use the cooker, oven and water maker. This takes some of the burden off the starboard alternator.
What have we been eating up until now? Our chef has served us up the following:
Saturday we had a hearty soup meal, Sunday fusilli pasta and yesterday pandan rice with tomatoes, broccoli, carrots, peppers and chicken pieces. Followed by a surprise pudding, Snickers ice cream. What a perfect small moment of happiness. Stomach reduction is in fashion at the moment, but we would have cheerfully gone for enlargement.
So now you are up to date with what is going on aboard. Today we will start to syphon the diesel from the bladder tanks on the foredeck and rear deck into the ship’s own port and starboard diesel tanks.
We will let you know how that goes.
With greetings from us all,
Edzard Braam
