moving along
21 May 2015
Bill/ sunny and hot
Well, I typed up the first part of this post a while ago and now that I went back to add to it, well, it was just gone. So, I'll be starting over again.
First of all, let me say that at 1330, we finally had some wind--almost 6 knots, and we turned off the engine for the first time in 24 hours!!! OH, THE SILENCE!!! Now we will see how long it lasts. The forecast is for winds out of the south to southeast up to maybe 10 knots. We'd love it!!! Most of us out here, at least what is reported on the morning SSB net are motoring. Let's hope we all get to just sail.
Anyway, the first part of the post was about the huge expanse of ocean we are sitting in. Since we left Gan, we have seen a total of one, yes, that's right, one boat and that was Code Zero that left a few hours before we did. I even fired up the radar this morning to see if there was anyone else out here. Nope, just us. Not a boat, not a plane and just a few birds. We've seen a few dolphins a while ago but nothing in the last few days. It's wide open out here with no one around. Before we started this voyage back in 2008, I wondered what it was like being out of sight of land. We'd only sailed on lakes. What was it like out of sight of land? We chartered a sailboat back in 2005 and took off for the British Virgin Islands for a week of fun. Our first time ocean sailing. We took it out far enough so we couldn't see land. No big deal. While we couldn't see land, we always knew where it was. The new generation of electronics and chart plotters makes it easy to "know' where land is. You might not be able to "see" it but you always know in your mind where it is. The advent of GPS over the last decade and new electronic chart plotters makes it now so much easier to know where land it and how to get either to it or back to it. I know that the Seychelles, on the route we are on are 1200 miles away. My computer tells me so. I have no less than 5 GPS units on board. All hooked up to different pieces of electronics. Twenty years ago, you better have a sextant or you'd have a problem. Now adays, no one has one. Oh, I own one(birthday gift many years ago) but I have no idea how to use it. In the end, being away from land no longer means being away from land.
While provisioning back in the Maldives, we found getting Coke, Pepsi and Schweppes a bit of a challenge. Schweppes in the Maldives only comes in 300ML bottles, no cans and it like all the rest Coke is made from RO water. That's salt water that's been processed into fresh water. Now if you want Schweppes back in Thailand, it comes in 325ML tall thin cans. In Malaysia, they come in 335ML cans that look just like what you get in the US yet the actual cans in the US come in 355ML. As for Coke and Pepsi, they come is assorted cans from 200ML short tiny cans to 300ML bottles and cans to 330ML. You don't know what you will find in the stores and sometimes you will find different sizes in the same store. --------------010906010203080906080708--