Footrot flats no more

0700/25th position 2858 02437 trip 131/24 Falmouth 2550

In an effort to save weight and make room for a flexible fuel tank, I left Berri's cockpit floorboards in the garage when McQ and I left Sydney in April last year. Did not matter on the Sydney – NWPThe Northwest Passage is a sea route through the Arctic Ocean, along the northern coast of North America via waterways amidst the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. More here. – UK trip because of the stuff in the cockpit and anyway we had boots on most of the time. Now, though, it does matter – the geometry of Berri's cockpit drains means that in these extreme rolloing conditions there's always a couple of inches of warm (32.5 deg – feels warmer than my skin but it ain't) water sloshing around on the cockpit sole. Bad karma – I can't stand having wet feet in my bunk and they were never dry. But this game is all about intelligent improvisation – in Falmouth I liberated a bit of ply from a chuck out to work as a floor for our inflatable and it just fitted up in the forepeak so I brought it with us and yep! it fits the cockpit floor as if it was specially cut – YAY!
In yesterday's post my congealed brain cell said that a BU was 5 days – it's really 6 as anyone would have known. We are at 11 deg N or 660 miles from the equator so a bit over one BU. Between here and there is the convergence zoneInter Tropical Convergence Zone, also known as The Doldrums and – if they are operating – the doldrumsInter Tropical Convergence ZoneInter Tropical Convergence Zone, also known as The Doldrums, also known as The Doldrums. The gribWeather files. Graphics in Binary file: GRIB files associate a specific weather datum (eg wind velocity or atmospheric pressure) with a geographic position. Because the resulting file is a collection of these points they are extremely small and so ideal over slow links such as sailmail. shows a doldrummy patch just ahead of us and I saw the loom of lightning over the horizon last night so things may change dramatically in the next couple of days. And the SE tradesBands of NW and SW winds either side of the equator that blow with more or less constant speed and direction all year. are blowing directly from the South so we'll be going to windward once we're through. Poo! But it is a mark of progress.Enter the ExaminerShe who asks awkward questions of the crew and tests them with difficult tasks., stage left, with sibilant hiss.

My sailmailSailmail is the system that Berrimilla uses for email communication. It is a non-profit association of yacht owners operating a network of private coast stations in the maritime Mobile Radio Service. propagationIn the logs, this refers to the radiation of signal energy and is customarily qualified by the words abysmal, ratshit or lousy app indicates that we may be out of range for some of the time out here -we'd be one of the very few boats ever to have used it in this bit of ogginOggin: naval slang for the sea, the ocean, where you go if you fall overboard… – so these posts may have to go via Iridium so will be very much shorter as Iridium isn't cheap for this old fart.