The best sailing so far
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Hello from Bahrain Team Pindar
Making good miles down the course over the last 24 hours, had a great night last night with relatively flat seas and 25 to 30 knots of wind, maybe the best sailing so far, averaging 18 knots without straining the boat.
This morning wind increased to 32 knots so too much for the masthead code 0 sail, and I changed to the J2, still averaging 17 knots. By now the waves have built up so its no more the magic carpet ride of before, but often stopping and starting on the waves, surfing at up 29 knots before ploughing into the wave in front, and then waiting for the next wave to pick you up, and the whole process starts again.
It’s a bumpy ride and made more tricky by the fact that the main has to be over trimmed much of the time to keep off the shrouds, so that the boat is rounding up quite often, and I have to go and ease the mainsheet to get her down to course. It’s fine when I am steering but it’s a lot to ask the pilot, so tonight I may have to put in an extra reef just to keep the boat on track.
The big news today is that I am on the same line of longitude as our partners, The Kingdom of Bahrain. If you went due south from Bahrain to the equator and then went the same distance south, twice more, you would arrive at our little boat tearing eastwards around the bottom of the world. Conditions are a little different as the air and water temperature are 3.9 degrees centigrade and the skies are perpetually cloudy and rainy. I could do with a little Bahrain warmth and sunshine right now, and not forgetting warm waters and 15 knot breezes! But that will have to wait for a couple more months until I have finished the other 2/3 of this trip around the world!
Its dark already, so soon time for a short nap on 2 beanbags with a sleeping bag pulled over the top of me. 3 or 4 catnaps through the night and one during the days seem to keep me well enough rested, though whether I would be rested in the normal sense of the word is probably unlikely.
Bye for now
Brian
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