Sep 05, 2005 – 1100hrs UTC

1100hrs 05 Sep 2005 UTC 22’36”N 024’53”W Ref 331

The S. Atlantic high is likely to be centred somewhere close to 23S 015W with a soft ridge extending west towards the S. American coast. Winds round a southern hemisphere high are anticlockwise so going to the west of the centre looks the better bet, and this is supported by the existence of the Benguela Current flowing NW up the African coast. The critical decision is how far west? Cutting the corner is a good idea as long as we have enough wind to keep moving or fuel to drive through the holes and the horse latitudes to the south of the high. We may have to stay close to S. America all the way down to 40S. We will have to wait until we get much closer and then assess the status of the ridge and the local winds. If I’m still able to keep 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. running (by no means certain) then 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. will give us enough to go on. Rhumb lineSee wikipedia (Wikipedia). See also Great CircleSee here (Wikipedia). distances around westabout are very close to my Daily Bull DTG. Watch this space.

Flying fish everywhere – one tiny one and one almost worth eating on deck this morning. I wonder what they can see when they are out of the water – they seem to be able to direct their flight around wave tops and along the troughs, but this may just be a feel for the updrafts – and they mostly miss us during the day, only arriving on board at night. Do they have specially adapted eyes? Humans can only see blurry outlines under water because of the different refractive index – is it the same in reverse for fish? And what about at night?

Heavy, humid and sweaty. Not pleasant. No major breakdowns so far – apart from this intensely frustrating problem with the USB-Serial port gizmoSome kind of gadget or other, normally infuriating which is irritatingly and unpredictably unstable and a nightmare to bring back up when it crashes. Takes several goes sometimes, and at least an hour of tense frustration. And I never know if it will work whenever I try to transmit. Not sure whether it loses power somehow (it is powered by the laptop through the USB cable) or is attacked by HFHigh Frequency – usually refers to HF radio which is long range digital radio that Berrimilla used to send all but a few of the logs on both circumnavigations. The radio was connected via a Pactor 3 digital modem to Alex’s laptop and used the Sailmail software application called Airmail to send emails and pull in emails, weather and GRIB files. Airmail also supports Iridium satellite telephone messaging and Alex used this as backup when the HF radio died approaching England. energy and gets switched off by the laptop trying to turn it into a serial mouse even though I’ve deleted the serial and HID mice. But I desperately and sincerely wish it wouldn’t. I hope Microsoft have a fix by the time we get back. I have reset the AISAutomatic Identification System. An automatic tracking system used on ships and by vessel traffic services (VTS) for identifying and locating vessels. port from 38400 baud to 4800 and disconnected all the AISAutomatic Identification System. An automatic tracking system used on ships and by vessel traffic services (VTS) for identifying and locating vessels. stuff in case that was affecting it, but doesn’t seem to have fixed it. spbf.