Day 5 - Flying fish and shooting stars all night long!
By Sharon Ferris-Choat
- UTC 14:20
- 22° 03'.426N
- 24° 48'.744W
- TWS 12.2 - 17.3 kn
- TWD 050° - 077°
- COG 181° on target 🎯
- SOG 8.7kn
- Sea State Slight 0.5 - 1.25m
- Barometer 1015 constant
Flying fish and shooting stars all night long! The flying fish dance in our running lights and always put on a good show until one tried to go down the hatch and into the sleeping area. Sarah was driving and saw the smelly flying object first and was fantastic to instruct action immediately in saving Flopsy 2 and Bianca saved him/her. We missed you last night Henrietta!
The shooting stars was the best display yet with several an hour all over the moon lite sky. Sea state and wind decreased over night and the wind went forward a little to give a great reaching TWA of 110° - 120°. Maiden loves this point of sail and we arrived at out 16th November midday way point 5:55 hours early, fantastic news.
We also race our boats on Predictwind and most of the time we are slightly ahead using our performance polars. If not we learn from our mistakes in our actions/decisions, log/record it so next time we hopefully don't relive that learning. This morning we had a sun rise for the memories. There was a green glow around the sun as it came out of a dust/sand pink glow. Before this at 05:06 UTC we had a commit/crashing space equipment or something fly over us and head towards Western Sahara. It was as bright as the moon last night and it went dimmer and then brightened again several times, it was with us for about 4 mins!
Today was again sights and now Molly is back on the wheel holding Maiden on course to Mindelo 306.3nm away, we are looking good for our morning arrival with the favorable weather forecast, just need to negotiate a thunderstorm tonight. Hadley has her job list done and now looking for more to reorganize and next was waste management, we recycle everything and she's all over it, amazing how different all the countries are on these policy's. Great learning chance for new ideas.
We have done 1 gybe in over 800nm and only a few sail changes so when the opportunity comes to do a change everyone is happy and busy. I have taken my off watches to catch up on some sleep, Heather is opposite me as watch leader and it's nice to be able to sleep and know Maiden is in good hands! I didn't realise how tired I was until feeling much fresher now!
It's great to hear people compliment each other on others improvements and we have a lot of that going on at the moment with Lungi, Bianca, Jenna and Molly all sustaining good driving numbers now on course. As we keep saying it's all about time and opportunity! Tomorrow it's birthday party time! Looking forward to it!
