noon 3327.19 17115.30 Tue 20/05/2008 03:10

dtdDistance to Dutch (Harbour) 1567 dmgDistance Made Good; More here 29 I guess there’ a always the possibility we could get stuck down here – the prospect at the mo is not good given the current forecasts. If it really does get pearshaped, the next best option might be Hawaii. This bit did not look so difficult off the NOAA stats and we might have got it seriously wrong least for this year. That would be a shame, but if is going to take us too long to get to Dutch, there’s no point in pretending. Kimbra and David W, watch this space.

3324.43 17118.36 @ 1020 Sydney time, I’ll save this blog for the noon position for what that will be worth!

Back under way. The wind has abated slightly, same direction, still the short lumpy sea, maybe 4 metre waves 15 metres apart, about half of them breaking and one or two much bigger, often arriving in trains of three with cross waves. Half the heady unrolled and we’re tracking a smidge N of W at about 3kts, intending to get over towards the advancing high and the predicted veer and softening wind, followed by the front of the next low and 35 knots again, from the SE. 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. and SatCSatcom: A worldwide communication system using the INMARSAT satellite network and allowing transfer of text and data (not voice) using compact and relatively cheap equipment predict that we’re going to have to negotiate at least one full on low pressure system with up to 55 knots in it somewhere to the north. Not a pleasant prospect. We can try to loiter till the nasty bit is past, but that puts us back in these northerlies again. 1300 miles to AmuktaA small yet mountainous island in the Islands of Four Mountains group lying between the Fox Islands and the Andreanof Islands in the Aleutian Islands. – 2 sydney – hobart races but this is harder and I don’t – of course – want to destroy the boat just for the sake of progress. When we have sail up and are moving, the boat’s motion is immediately much easier, because the pressure in the sail dampens the rolls and keeps the boat heeled.

On iridium, the last blog went Cable & Wireless. I don’t want to be swapping SIMs around between handsets in these conditions to try to diagnose, so I will retry Xsat periodically and just pay the money to C & W if still dead. Irksome, though, because I’ve already paid for my 500 minutes what I don’t seem to be able to use as intended and an absolute pain to have to fiddleFiddle: a little wooden wall to stop things sliding off a flat surface with the wiring and connections each time I do a data call. The iridium hardware was designed for stable, dry platforms, dry hands, no salt…..