Day 5: dead calm

The wind picked up a little after I wrote yesterday’s entry so I managed to sail for a couple of hours but by around 1pm it started playing silly beggars, suddenly switching direction randomly before fading away completely. I tried to keep up with it for a while and Odyssey performed an elegant series of manouevres, ending up going backwards at one point. This was the final straw so I furled the genoa and fired up the Perkins again.

As we chugged across this endless blue desert the scale of the ocean really hit me. It’s a vast featureless expanse and at the moment with no wind it’s like an enormous waterbed, undulating gently with the underlying swell. I’ve noticed that the main swell comes from the south-east at the moment, sending long lazy ridges of water along the surface. They’re probably around 1-2m high but very long so we just rise and fall gently as they pass under us. There’s also another much smaller swell from the south-west and sometimes they combine to cause an annoying little peak which rolls us around and makes the booms rattle.

I spent the day doing what I do best – lazing around in the sun reading and eating, until at 5pm I thought I should do something about the autopilot. Having spent so much on the top-of-the-range model it seemed silly not to be using it, so I stopped the engine and started dismantling the interior of the boat. It didn’t take long to figure out that in order to daisy-chain the instruments properly I’d need to run another wire from the autopilot control head through the engine room and up into the repeater at the chart table. Luckily I’ve got all the tools and wires and bits and pieces I need, so was able to do it easily enough.

It’s now working perfectly and is integrated properly with the radar, which can take advantage of the fancy stabilised gyro thingy in the autopilot to track targets more accurately than it was before. All I need to do now is rewire the instrument pod over the companionway which I’ll try to do later today.

By the time I finished it was 7pm so I cooked up some rice and beans while still drifting peacefully with the current. The sun sank slowly towards the horizon and it was all so calm and still that it seemed a shame to fire up the engine again, but I would rather like to get to Bermuda sometime this month.

The night passed uneventfully with my usual routine of 2-hour sleeps. This seems to work well, probably because apparently we sleep in 90-minute cycles although I was woken a couple of times by the radar alarm. In both cases it was just showing rain or squalls or something so in the end I switched it off and trusted my luck to statistics.

This morning I’m still motoring as the wind is a fickle 3 to 5 knots from the south but at least I’m getting out of the hurricane path as quickly as possible. There aren’t any around at the moment but I’m pretty much in the middle of one of the two most common paths they take, so will be glad to be out of it in a couple of days.

I saw my first ship today for over 48 hours, heading north on the far eastern horizon.. I waved but I don’t think they saw me. Actually I don’t mind as it’s wonderful being alone out here, seeing the world in the same way that seafarers have since time began.

Speaking of time (sort of), I’ve started reading my books on celestial navigation and will have a go today at using my fancy new sextant. I’ve never tried it before so won’t be switching off the satellite navigation system anytime soon, but hope by the end of my voyage to have learnt the ancient and arcane art of navigating by the sun, planets and stars.

Before I do that however the sun is heating up nicely so it’s time to lounge on the poop deck for a bit to top up my tan 🙂

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