Lunch €” Saturday 08.05.06

Lunch was Fish Stew, using the last of our fresh Yellow Fin Tuna, with onions, carrots, potatoes, a tomato, lots of garlic and 1/3 a bottle of a 2004 Graves, that went in the stew, not the cook (drinks only on even days….).

Location: 22° 02.2 S 035° 04.8 W
Saturday 12:00, 08.05.2006

The Schooner Maggie B was at 22° 02.2 S 035° 04.8 W at noon on August 5th. We have gone 626 NM since Salvador, Tristan da Cunha is 1490 and Cape Town is 2926.

This is idyllic sailing. We have 9-12 knots of wind, the sheets are just started from close hauled as we are 45 degrees off the relative wind and she is slipping along at 6-7 knots. The sun is out but not too hot, t-shirt weather, and there is a gentle, long, 8-10 foot swell from the south. Occasional, rare whitecaps show off the deep, deep blue of the ocean. There are no reefs or islands to run into for hundreds of miles. We haven’t seen a ship in a day and our “See-Me” radar detector, which can sniff a ship’s radar perhaps 100 miles away, is quiet. Puffy “fair weather” clouds are scattered around, and the moon is up at 2/3 full, promising a bright night watch.

The only frustration of the day was trying to get this Dell to talk to the Furuno Ethernet, so that we can get the MaxSEA software to talk to the GPS and boat performance system. If we could get it to work, MaxSEA will help us work out routing, given the ship’s performance and the wind data the we download each day. But MaxSEA is French and Furuno is Japanese and we all on board get a little hazy when you have to start assigning different components different IP addresses. Perhaps there is a guru in Cape Town.
We seem to be on schedule to pick up the SW quadrant of the next high coming from the west. The barometric pressure is rising here, which should presage the high coming. In the SW quadrant we should have nice 20 knot NW winds, which we can ride across. Our turn point, from south to east, is about 26S/32W or 340 NM, or just over two days.

All is well.