Location: 33° 04S, 52° 16W
Monday 02.04.2008

The Schooner Maggie B was at at noon on February 4th. We were under all plain sail, making 6.5 knots Northeastward in 12-15 knots of wind from the WNW. It is a lovely day. We are about 15 NM off the coast of Brazil, carrying about a know of favorable current, presumably the backwash of the Brazilian current.

We have come 381 NM from Buenos Aires and have 377 NM to go to Florianopolis and 3046 to go to Antigua.

This morning there was a beautiful astronomical sight just before dawn: the moon was on its last day, only a finger nail slice, and Venus and Jupiter were right next by. It was like silver and diamonds on a velvet cloth.

A part of our 110 AC electric system is a sensor that watches for the proper current and polarity coming in from the generator and from shore power. On the last day in Punte del Este I was sitting at the desk in the ship’s office and heard the sound of crackling and popping from behind the main switch panel. When I opened the panel, there was some smoke coming from the AC sensor panel. I turned off the power and disassembled the paneling to get at the main sensor. It had burnt out and melted one of the coils. It is all detached now and shouldn’t be any problem until we go to plug into 110 volt power, but that won’t be until Canada landfall, where it will be easy to fix.

One of the restaurants in Punte del Este had a charmingly fractured English-language menu. Fortunately their chef made better paella than their translator wrote menus. Some of our favorites were: Padded Codfish; Sprout her Special; Pan of mud, bound in her own sauce; Stewed lamb with blow, onion and potato; and Prawns to the Iron. (For those of you not familiar with US drug slang, blow=cocaine).

To our frustration, the Furuno autopilot is out again. I have emailed for help from their US HQ, where we have always gotten good support. Because we are handsteering, we now have a fairly complicated watch system as we are five and have decided to have one hour solo watches during the day and two person, three hour, overlapping “sociable” watches at night- sociable meaning that you spend part of your watch with one person and part with another.

There has been a lot of traffic. Perhaps one very large ship every four hours, generally not too far from our track, especially if Northbound. There are also groups of fishing boats around. Before noon today we got a squeeze play as on our starboard bow, we spotted two anchored fishing boats, clearly working together with a net between them. From behind us, on our port quarter, came a small coastal tanker, making good speed. Our eyeballs and the radar collision analysis showed that we would all come together at the same place. We skinned by the fishing boats by 100 yards, getting a few waves or fists and had at least 500 yards to spare from the tanker.

It is great to be sailing again in perfect schooner conditions.

All is well.