Location: 31° 34.96 S, 24° 44.6 W
Thursday 12:00, 08.10.2006

The Schooner Maggie B’s noon position on August 10 was 31° 34.96 S 24° 44.6 W. The wind was 330 degrees at 10-12 knots and we were heading 115 degrees at 7.3.

The noon position using GPS was confirmed by sun sight, which came up with a latitude of 31 degrees 35 minutes South. Right on! During the morning watch, it was noticed that we were getting an increased amperage draw from the Furuno GPS/radar/plotter, so it was shut down. After breakfast and an extra cup of espresso, Max and Bart went on the chase of the electrical fault like junior versions of Inspector Morse and Hercule Poirot. Instead of “Ah ha, it was a left-handed woman between the ages of 45 and 50!” it was “I have a ground fault in the secondary DC negative buss!”

All was cleared up by lunch (Mahi Mahi baked with potatoes and cauliflower), with the culprits being a damaged circuit breaker (poor construction) and some loose fittings. Meanwhile Lieve and I brushed off our musty memory of sun sights and cleaned up the sextant. We will try for star sights tonight at dusk. We also broke out GPS #2 (there also is a GPS #3).

The weather today is what in Maine we would call a smoky southwester, except here it probably would be called a norte/oeste fumaria, being Brazilian and from the Northwest. We are watching to the Southwest for LaVerne, but the wind stays light and the barometer steady at 1024.

One question we have gotten over email is how we keep in shape at sea. There is no one answer. One thing that is hard for landsmen to realize is that on a sailboat at sea, walking to the bow is more like playing on a jungle gym than walking down a street. Even sitting to read or eat, you are always tensioned or braced in some fashion. Even now while wedged into the ship’s office to type, my left leg is braced against the step and both elbows have to actively keep me relatively level with the keyboard. Certainly, also, raising, lowering and adjusting sails give you a regular upper body workout, as does coiling lines, polishing the binnacle, etc. During night watch I do some yoga to stay flexible, dimly-remembered ballet exercises using the binnacle grab rail as the barre, and occasionally pull in and let out the main sheet by hand to get the muscles moving. We probably eat less than when on land. Generally our big meal is all together at lunch. Dinner, due to different watch schedules, is usually pretty light — cold potato and a cup of soup, or a few slices of salami and cheese with some crackers. We don’t have many sodas on board, so a Coke is a small celebration and we drink almost no alcohol — just a glass of wine or a beer every other day.

Another question is about how we stay in contact. The inexpensive Dell lap top is connected to an Iridium sat phone. Email is handled by an organization called UUPlus. On the computer, UUPlus is the email program. When you finish a letter and press “Send,” the program takes the file, compresses it and stores it in a “Send Queue.” UUPlus does not allow fancy formatting, different fonts, “smilies,” or anything but basic letters and numbers. On the other end, UUPlus will regularly sweep any email accounts (except AOL…) and collect your mail, compress it and strip off fancy coding and most attachments. Big files are sent back to the sender with a note. Then when you are ready, you press “Connect” on the computer and it takes over the Iridium phone, dials up the UUPlus connection, dumps your mail “ashore” and grabs the packet ready to go. It will also pick up specific web files, like weather charts. Connection is usually pretty slow for land-based, perhaps 4800 bytes, but with the compression and simplification, I can uplink 5-10 messages, get the same back, plus a big weather file, all in perhaps a minute, which costs about $1.50 (plus the cost of the sat phone). I could do all this on SSB, where there is generally one fixed charge, but connection is rather more chancy, much, much slower, and the weather charts less usable.

I smell chocolate chip muffins ready for tea.

All is well.