Izz - Cortes' men would have said the same, but in spanish, unless I've got him mixed with one of the others - pizzaro perhaps. One of them slogged across the isthmus from the carribean to the pacific midst much hardship. didn't some DWM like tennyson write a poem 'alone on a peak in darien' or something similar?
Malcom - tks for purse seiner - that's what it was for sure. But I thought they hunted in pairs for some reason. Also for colour of lightning. Question - we've had a 25 deg difference between hdg and course over grnd as if east current 2-3 kts - is it so?
Mind games 1: played this in the atlantic too - if every ship that had ever been in this patch were here now, all around us, what would we see? Lots of WW2 warships, including Jack Kennedy in PT 109 perhaps, some early explorers - chinese junks, portugese carracks, other SE asian craft...not much modern shipping passes here, I expect, and, of course, the fishermen. A bit out of the way for the polynesians too.
mind games 2: I sometimes occupy the neuron with silly sums in the small hours, just to keep it awake and not hallucinating. My best marathon time was a bit under 2.42, or about 9 knots in round terms if I've done the conversion right. That means i was running about 30% faster than we're sailing now. Looked at at night, the water rushing past always seems to go faster but it still seems awful fast. Today, of course, I'd find it hard to keep up with berri.
We've been moving all night - about 6 kts in 12-13 kts easterly with occasional softish squalls. Havent run the engine significantly yet so no news there. more sums - there should be about 150 ltrs of water in the tank - so if no watermaker, we're on 2 ltrs/day each to Dutch. Grim. Am going to practise - mug of tea for breakfast, powdered milk, 4 sugar lumps, perhaps half a litre. 750ml Con at noon with liferaft rations, and a litre of water at night with more rations. Already feeling thirsty.
Huge squall just took my entire day's sweat ration to get sail in, reefs done etc. Furlers are great but they do have their idiosyncrasies.
And we have another purse seiner with us. This one has a helicopter on the upper deck.
