3 star sailing with a 5 star menu

DAY 3 - 27th November 2007

Position: 26º 04' N 21º 09' W
Bearing: 260º
Distance to go: 2381 Nm

On watch at 06.00 very, very, very tired even after a good, deep sleep. How do these professional sailors sail solo such huge distances on so little sleep?

We had some low cloud first thing in the morning with the wind dropping. Time for more sail so we put the No1 genoa up aswell. With the No3 genoa already flying we put the new sail on a spare groove on the roller furling gear. By putting the second sail on the same halyard we would be able to furl them both together. With the 2 sails now goosewinged we reaped the benefits immediately bringing our average speed up to 8 knots. Steering a course of 260º we were sailing on the rhumb line.

The sun came out and we were living the high life. Even when you're sailing on coastal passages there will be times when you're out of sight of land, but when your world shrinks to a 4 or 5 mile horizon it takes some getting used to. At times you feel you could reach out and touch the edge. We spied one or 2 boats during the morning and the definition of a sailing race being "2 boats on the same ocean" Dave proposed we give chase. As they disappeared ahead of us we consoled ourselves with thought they must have been a lot bigger than us.

There is a great mix of backgrounds on our watch and today we reaped the benefit of Mark's software/IT background, not in fixing the computers but reading the celestial navigation book I brought with me. His mathematical brain made short work of the process and so we took our first sights. At present we are finishing the calculations so stand by for our first reduction. We would be pleased with anything in the Northern Hemisphere.

Although Jeremy was feeling better throughout the morning he went downhill again later in the day. Everyone on board is hoping he'll be up and about soon and most of us just feel lucky we've escaped so far...maybe we should call him Nelson as it's said that the famous captain was often seasick.

With the boat sailing well in the sunshine what could be better...Susie's lunch of course...homemade bread, cherry tomato and goats cheese tart with salad...how does she do it? I'm just glad the other watch were on washing up duty!

We were back on watch for the 18.00 to 20.00 shift. With the sails still goosewinged there wasn't much to do but as the wind dropped and veered it made for some frustrating helming.

A quick handover to the next watch, followed by a dash for my bunk and 4 hours sleep felt like 10 minutes.

You can track the progress of Northern Child, which is updated every hour, on their web site at:
northernchild.com