Day: 8 July 2018

Day 19, Sunday 8th July. 44-42N, 177-48W. Daily Run: 122 NM. Weather: 5 Knots S, damp & foggy. 2220 NM to go
Another dull day at the office, actually, I’m so engrossed in the program I’m writing that I sometimes forget I’m on a boat in the middle of a big ocean. The weather improved a little yesterday afternoon and we got some sailing in, but the rolling was still a problem, by morning today we had good wind, and the rolling was slight, however the fog has rolled back in, heavy this time and the wind has dropped to less than 5 knots, and we are wallowing around. I have started the engine as the solar panels don’t generate very much in these conditions. I’m very conscious of how much fuel we are using on the engine and the heating, so I’m keeping the revs low, unfortunately this is not good for the engine. Yesterday was fun, we passed the International dateline, we put our calendars back by a day, so instead of being Sunday afternoon, it became Saturday afternoon. Then we moved the clocks forward by 2 hours to American Samoa Time, this seems like a good time zone for us. so now we are 11 hours behind UTC/GMT. I wish the phone allowed me to schedule alarms using UTC, now all my alarms for wx fax and BBC news are 2 hours early.
The AIS/GPS unit duly showed us reaching 180deg East, then flipped to 179 deg West in a second.
Earlier this morning we crossed the halfway mark, Kathy was asleep and I was on watch, this is an arbitrary point as it’s difficult to measure the distance that we halved, is it the distance we should travel, i.e. the perfect route, or the distance we have travelled and an estimate of how far our destination is away. In the end I measured the route we planned over ground and have divided it by two, and used that distance from our destination as the halfway mark which is 2297 miles
Our daily run of 122 is ok considering the weather, it would be over 130 if we hadn’t lost the 2 hours.
Yesterday we saw 2 ships passing, amazingly one had to change course to give us a wide berth!
Paul Collister

Day 18, Sunday 8th July. 32-39N, 179-45E. Daily Run: 128 NM. Weather: 5-10 Knots S, damp & foggy. 2343 NM to go
A miserable 24 hours where the high pressure system went walkabout, and walked right up to us and is now sitting on us with a barometer reading of 1030, the chart actually has the centre at 1036, so we are a little bit out from there. Often high pressure brings with it lovely conditions, clear sunny skies, light breezes etc, but sometimes, like today it brings damp miserable fog. The winds are light and we have two wave trains, one from the SE and one from the SW, One gives us a gentle roll, the other is slamming us around, together the boat either gets off lightly, or gets pushed badly. This is like being in a rolly anchorage, but it’s been going on for 24 hours now, with no sign of stopping. Saying that, as I type, some sunshine has just broken through, lets hope this is the start of better weather. There is still a gale a few hundred mile to the north, but in retrospect, we would have done better to get closer to it.
I have been doing very minor chores, and last night I had a go at programming, and to my delight I found I can hack a few hours at the keyboard without any feelings of nausea. This is great, so I have been developing an app on my MacBook and quite enjoying it.
We ran the engine this morning for 6 hours as the sun wasn’t getting through the fog, also we are going crazy today and having showers, so the engine will heat up the hot water nicely.
In a couple of hours we cross the international date line, people often do something to celebrate this, but we won’t, I think they are getting confused with the equator. We will just watch the GPS showing us going from East to West, partly for fun, but partly because if there was going to be a glitch in the GPS software, this would be when it shows up, it must be a scenario that’s difficult to test in the lab. I still find it difficult to get around the day gain, I expect tomorrows blog will be Day 19, Sunday. This is getting to be a bit like ‘a month of sundays’ If I head back this way I lose the day I gained, but I’m wondering about that, today I gain 6 hours of Saturday and 14 hours of Sunday, but if I head back I may gain different parts of different days all together. It gets very confusing. For tax purposes, does this count as an extra day out of the country?
Kathy was delighted to hear from her family via email that England can actually win football matches, growing up in England, we always thought that having invented the game we were also brilliant at it, not so really. My brothers know a lot more than me on the subject, but I seem to recall we haven’t won this trophy since The Beatles were still gigging, and I have heard people say that if the ref had had his specs on, we might not have won that game.
We are almost half way, I think that will call for a small celebration.
Paul Collister