Day 45, Year 6 Happy Birthday, Jed!
Date: Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Weather: Totally Overcast, Winds ESE 15-20
Latitude: 29 52.080 S
Longitude: 031 25.092 E
Miles Traveled: 78.5
Miles to Go: 268
Location: Passage from Richards Bay to East London, Day 1
Jed, we are thinking of you on your birthday. Hope it is a good one. We backed out of our slip at Tuzi Gazi at 4:30 am and have had a good first day on our way south. I say ‘good’ not ‘great’ because it has been a gray day with mixed winds and current. But we made 73 miles in our first 12 hours and that is good. All day today the color of the ocean has been steel gray and as dusk approaches, the sky and the sea are merging into one. The winds have been steady from behind us but the three meter seas cause us to roll and lose wind out of the sails. So we have been motor assisting most of the day. We want to get as far south as possible during this weather window, so we are pushing hard. For a period in the morning we had a great two knot boost from the famed Agulhas Current, but we lost it as we got closer to Durban. Actually we got a knot of current against us, but now that we are past Durban we have no current at all. Hopefully at some point we will once again get a boost from the current.
Communications have been challenging today. We have not been able to hear the weather reports but this evening we could hear Pieter of Odulphus who is headed from Durban to Port Elizabeth and he relayed that the weather report is holding. We have until Saturday before the south winds come and we should be East London on Friday. If the south winds on Saturday are going to be from the SE and are light as Pieter indicated tonight, we could possibly make Port Elizabeth on Saturday. We’ll just have to see how the weather plays out. The other challenging communication issue is the availability of HAM radio stations. We have always had India, Indonesia, as well as the two South African stations. But today we could get nothing. Now that it is evening, Mark is connected to the Jakarta, Indonesia station so I am going to sign off and try to send this while we have the chance.
