From: OmanTri
To: update
Subject: 29th January
Date: 29/01/2009 03:43:17


Since yesterday at this time we have covered nearly 430nm – we have been
sailing in a pretty straight line, where we want to go in wind, and sea
conditions we dared not have chosen for ourselves. Considering we are 46,
almost 47 degrees south the conditions are sensational – suncream is
required on deck, and we have managed to sail down a lane between the High
pressure to the north, and the Low pressure to the south – looking at the
satellite pictures that download automatically onboard there is a coridor
around 170nm wide – and we have just been sailing down it, clear skies, nice
wind – great direction. Soon the winds will shift a little to the west
allowing us to rotated our heading more to the East as we don’t want to get
too much further south, and in a day or so we’ll start to head NE towards
the Cook Strait, conditions will change a bit as we get a front catching up
with us – and that will almost certainly drop the tempreture somewhat and be
a bit squally for a while, then we should be good for a nice sail up the
Tasman Sea to New Zealand.

Mohsin said to me today that he can’t believe our luck – the weather has
been so good, and getting to this point on the globe without needing gloves
is really incredible – we are just so lucky. This is not what we had
prepared him for – each of us giving him little keep warm ideas…. the
weather will change eventually, it always has, and always will do, and
those tips for keeping warm will come in very handy!

Else where onboard the steady 3hrs on 3hrs off continues, and today sees the
first of our southern ocean food bags – there isn’t too much difference –
just some of the meals are 800kcal meals rather than 500 kcal of the
standard food- we have only got to them now as we are going well against our
80 day schedule – not that it matters we are eating plenty and don’t need to
extra calories now to keep warm. The 80 day schedule has been marked on our
electronic charts since the start – but we have paid little attention to it
thus far – in the indian ocean it’s progress was relentless as we struggled
through the doldrums, but now the comparisons are slightly easier to draw,
and we can see that by crude calculation we are something like 3 full days
ahead of this pace boat – this is due to the recent fantastic few days runs
which have been well in excess of what the pace boat is capable of. I did
some calculations earlier and our average VMC for the trip so far is 12.2.
kts – we have sailed more miles than that so our actual average speed
through the water is quite a bit more than that – but this is the average
rate at which we have been reducing our distance to finish by since the
start – multiply that out by the number of miles give an elapsed time… you
can do the maths on that – with the usual warning that the speed can go
down as well as up etc.etc etc. but it comes to quite a realistic time. We
can improve on it though and the next few weeks after New Zealand will show
just what’s possible – we could have quite a few 400+ mile days and that’ll
put a big leap on the paceboat – it’s all too far away to dare to think
about it – however tempting – but these are the calculations that are beind
done privatly watch after watch by each of us onboard,just how quick can we
be. It’s not that we want to get it overwith , we are competetive and we
wanna put in a good time!

As the sun rose this morning ( remember it rises at 2000hrs gmt so it a bit
confusing which day is which ! ) I did have a pag of guilt. That what we
are doing is hugely indulgent, there are so few things you do for this long
without having to do normal day to day stuff, shopping, putting the rubbish
out, fill the car up with fuel,paying bills all the things that are going on
every day in normal life that we just don’t have to do – yet we do go
shopping – I open a new food bag and put it into the storage bags ( our
kitchen cupboards), we do put the rubbish out – we tie up the rubbish bag,
and take it to the sail locker for storage, we do fill the car up – every 5
days or so I fill the generator’s fuel tank from the main tank, it’s just
that it’s all here to hand. So sorry for everyone that is doing the normal
things in life today, expecially those people who are doing it for
us, -we’ll be back to reality really soon – just let us indulge ourselves
a while longer.