Piriapolis 26 October 2011

Pelagic is about to head south to begin another season. I left Pelagic on the hard in Piriapolis for the winter back in June and have spent most of the winter refitting 'Pelagic Australis' in Cape Town, and delivering her back to the Falklands where her, newly married, crew Miles, and Laura, Wise took over and have begun their season already with a trip to South Georgia. I flew from the Falklands to Uruguay on the 8/9th of October. Dave Roberts (usually the regular nipper on Pelagic Australis) joined me after a week and the two of us have been working on Pelagic since then. We tidied up some final painting jobs, touched up the anti-fouling, had the topsides polished and put on a new Pelagic logo and name. We got her back in the water last Friday and have been re-commissioning the systems since.

We have a new high power fish-finder/sonar from our sponsors Raymarine http://www.raymarine.com for this season so have installed the transducer and temporarily hooked it up to our E80 chart plotter, so now we'll have a nice clear image of the seabed beneath Pelagic rather than just a display giving the depth in meters. We have more goodies from Raymarine to install in Stanley including, a new high-definition digital radar, and the latest touch screen multifunction display.

The plan is to sail from Piriapolis to Stanley departing sometime this coming weekend; exactly when depends on a weather system blowing through as we have a Pampero blowing now which is going to morph into a southerly on Friday night.

The crew for this trip to Stanley will be; myself (Chris Harris), Magnus Day, Dave Roberts, Dylan Stephenson, Tom Elsby. The first three of us are all "Pelagic Expeditions" old hands but this will be Dylan and Tom's first experience of an ocean voyage; we'll keep you updated on how it goes for them. Dylan and Tom are both young lads from the Falklands so have flown up to join us here jsut for this trip.