I'm at 8-57, 23-41, with consistent light winds continuing. Time passes easily, but I am certainly aware of it with such an unvaried life. Unlikely I'll ever do such a long passage alone again, so I am trying to savor it. If I had the last few seasons of the Sopranos on board, my life would be complete.
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Nothing very exciting to report, knock on wood. The South Atlantic lives up to its benign reputation. The last few days I have had mainly light but consistent winds and have had few sail changes. My daily runs are back over 100 miles a day, a gratifying 120 miles yesterday. Food, water, fuel and systems all holding out well. Haven't seen a ship since before the last post. [oops, saw one an hour after I wrote this. Radar alarm picked it up at 8 miles.] My morale is good and my state of mind is consistent with the sailing conditions. I am now 1100 miles (a little over a week) from my planned stop at Fernandho Naronha. I am not really in need of anything and there isn't anything available there anyway. I have started to consider continuing the passage through to the Caribbean (another 2000 miles). The purpose of the FN stop was to provide a break, and I do not feel at this point that I need one as I am well settled into the shipboard routine. I don't have to decide until I get near there because the course is pretty much the same either way.
Tech note. A few nights ago the main GPS (I have a lo-end Garmin with a rudimentary chartplotter in the cockpit) beeped twice and displayed the following error message: "Antenna input shorted--no position." Uh oh. I spent a good portion of that night working that problem through. This is a unit with a built-in antenna mounted inside a rear housing that also carries the unit's bracket-mounting screws. That housing comes off with 4 screws and the main unit need not be disassembled--good engineering. Actually it turned out not to be necessary even to take off the rear housing because the antenna lives on top of the unit under a plastic screw top. The antenna itself is an elegant thing, a printed circuit board whose flexible substrate is rolled into a quarter-sized cylinder with a metal cap at the bottom, open at the top to the vibrations of the universe (especially those coming from the GPS satellites). The unit did seem very slightly corroded in places and I had to assume there were small current paths between the tracks on the board, antenna and ground plane respectively I assume. Comes with the territory in a marine environment. I very carefully (for me) rinsed and cleaned and solvented. Unfortunately there is very little room for the small coaxial cable to extend and its ground connection broke off the bottom plate of the antenna. After a brief meltdown I was able to find a little bit of fine wire from the junk bag and to solder the can back to the cable. (When I get home, I am going to explore a career in neo-natal surgery!) Anyway, after all that and including about 6 unsuccessful trial runs, it began to work again, though I suspect that the effectiveness of the antenna has been compromised a little. I do have a backup handheld GPS (and the sextant backing that up) but I have become awfully fond of the little chartplotter and was glad to have it online again.
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03/19/2009
Nothing much to report. Position is 21-29/10-08. Passed the theoretical halfway point today on day 17. Had a few days of good mileage, but nearly calm right now. Lots of showers the last few days with lots of wind shifts--sail changes: reefing, pole up, pole down--you know the drill. Main developing some issues, mainly with the Dutchman slides along the luff, which have been an ongoing problem. Hard to fix underway, so I'll go jib and mizzen for the rest of this leg, which will be fine as long as the wind speed is decent. Made a wonderful beef stew for lunch and dinner today to celebrate halfway.
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