Heading North along the African coast
25 January 2016 | 29 29.20S:15 57.42E
Bill/clear and cool
We finally lost what wind we had last night about 2200 so the sails came down and the motor was started and we have been forced to motor ever since. The night was lite by the full Moon but I did get to see the line up of the planets that was in the new recently. Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and I'm not sure of the fifth. The seas were so calm that Venuss glow was reflected off the water! Now that is calm water. The last two mornings have found our decs soaked with dew from the night time condensations. We have to go out as the Sun rises and dry all the windows in the dodger and side panels. All the decks are soaked as is Puff(our dinghy). Sure glad we have the ability to close up the cockpit. It's quite cold out here at night but as we get further north, it's not quite as cold. The temperature in the cockpit today was 67, yesterday it was 64. The water has begun to warm also. When we left South Africa, it was 56. Now it's in the mid 60s. We are both still wearing socks and jackets to stay comfortable.
Had to stop writing for a while as Tracy had lunch ready. Our lunches are more like dinner so it gives us a chance to actually work some of it off. Today was steak filets and potatoes with a salad on the side. With it being such a flat sea, it was the perfect time to have such a great lunch. As we finished off the meal, we saw on our chart plotter that we were getting the AIS signal from the Queen Elizabeth. She would be passing us about 3 miles off our starboard side on their way to Cape Town, due to be there tomorrow afternoon. With her doing over 20 knots(to our 5) she will have no problem doing it. I called her on our VHF radio to say hello. The seas are still flat calm but there is just a bit of wind starting off our port bow so maybe we will get to sail and stop using our precious diesel fuel. It's always one of our major expenses when we enter a port. We have the mainsail and forestaysail up now and if the wind shifts anymore to port, we will roll out the genoa. Its the "power"sail on board Zephyr. But first, we have to wait for the winds. We are seeing good bit of white birds flying around Zephyr, diving on the small fish in the area. Large and small flocks of them, weaving and diving as they go. We are still seeing quite a few seals but we are quite a ways from shore so not as many as we saw yesterday. We only did about 115 miles yesterday since the wind was so light and at our current rate, we should be in Luderitz sometime Wednesday morning. we've had about a knot of current coming from the north so it's slowing us down too. We will have to judge our speed as we get closer as we don't want to get in there at night. When we checked our electronic charts on our new Vulcan 7 plotter, we found that the download from Navionics was incomplete not installing all the definition we expected from them. We will be calling them once we get to Luderitz and probably have to re download them all over again. As it is, the Vulcan 7s program got fouled up sometime yesterday making all the information we had installed vanish when i did a reboot. Some kind of glitch in the software is my guess. The Vulcan 7 is a relatively new product from B & G so it may take a while to get the bugs fixed. There have been two software updates just since we bought it last November. Guess we will see how it works out in Luderitz. Meanwhile we have the Navionics program on the IPad as well as Open CPN on the Windows computer so there will be no problem getting in once we arrive. Winds over the next few days are still forecast to be light and thats fine. I'll take light over what we had along the east coast of South Africa. More to come.