Location: 23° 23.9 S, 37° 00 E
Saturday 12:00, 10.28.2006

The Schooner Maggie B was at 23° 23.9 S, 37° 00 E at noon on October 28th. We are booming along at a boat speed of 9 kts, with a speed over the ground of 9.4. This is the perfect point of sail for the Maggie B — 20 knots of wind on the beam. We will be at Bassas d’India at about dawn tomorrow.

We did 195 NM from noon yesterday, not bad for “going the wrong way” up the Mozambique Channel.

It is warm again, with the sea water up to 78 degrees (25C) and the air is warm enough for bathing suits on watch during the day.
It is about 880 NM to Nose Be. We have gone 1398 since Cape Town.

The patterns on a boat sailing 24/7 are very interesting. We all have two three hour watches a day: Frank 12-3; Hannah 3-6; Willis 6-9; and Bori 9-12. It seems as if each thinks that their watch is the easiest, but in any case three on and nine off is pretty light duty. Of course everybody’s sleep patterns are different. At any given time one to three of us (hopefully never four!) are asleep. We all make a big effort to be up together for the mid-day meal. With this schedule, it is easy to get eight hours of sleep a day - just not all at the same time. It seems to take one’s body two to three days to accept the change, but then there is plenty of energy all around.

Off duty time is for ship work: cleaning, polishing, vacuuming, food prep, stitching, making fancy work, repairs, systems maintenance, and planning. Plus personal work: emails, reading, letter writing, watching videos (our laptops play DVD’s very well). Half the books we are reading are closely ship related such as The East African Pilot, or Brandt’s Madagascar, or Pilote Cotier des Seychelles.

Where we are headed is definitely navigationally complicated. You would think that with GPS and radar all would be easy, but every storm reconfigures sand banks which stretch up to 30 miles off the Madagascar coast. Buoys are non-existent. Even the position of Bassas d’India varies by two miles on different charts and reference books. Somewhat tough with it only six miles across and the highest point two meters (except for the, gulp, ship wrecks).

Hopefully we will be playing in the lagoon tomorrow (plus doing ship repairs that can only be done in calm water).

All is well.