Day 34 - On the Move Again

We were sailing again at 2.30 AM. I was rolling over for another bout of sleep at 2 AM when I noticed the hum of the Rutland. On deck I saw that the wind was a viable 13 kts or so I rolled out a bit of jib to get of going, calculated that a gybe was required, and soon we were moving due east at about 3.2 kts under autopilot control. We had drifted 7 miles SSE while lying ahull. The grib file predicted a steadily increasing wind so I expected at least 24 hours of good progress.

I started up the Acer netbook backup machine to retrieve some files. It booted up OK and behaved after I hit the "shift" key several times. I was pleased to see that it had over 2 hours of battery life remaining.

I decided to bake a loaf of bread and spent an hour setting things up and kneading the dough. I think that I solved the problem of how to keep the dough warm during the rising stage by filling two hot water bottles with boiled sea water and putting them in the oven before the kneading process. Both the yeast and flour are over a year old, and I didn't measure anything, so I wasn't sure what the result would be. The butter was from Argentina but still tasted OK. After I put the dough in the oven to rise I checked our position and at 9.30 AM we were 400 miles from Cape Town.

At noon our position was 35S31, 010E51, giving us a n-n distance of 44 miles to the east. The barometer had fallen 8 points to 1018 HPa. We were now 390 miles from Cape Town. We were running before a 20 kt WNW wind and I had just reduced sail for a more comfortable ride. Our speed was now about 4.5 kts.

The bread came out very good. I got into trouble because I had prepared too much - more than 1 kg of flour went into it - and at the first rising it overflowed the big square pan that I was using. It wasn't the most beautiful loaf that I have baked but it was light and had a thick brown crust on top. Naturally I helped myself to a large piece of it while it was still warm, and it was delicious. The important thing was that the yeast and the flour proved to be OK.

I began the passage by transmitting my blogs at around midnight. As we approached SA I was able to send them at about 7 PM. The propagation matrix now tells me that I should be able to transmit during the afternoons using the higher frequencies, so I plan to try that now (2 PM) in the hopes of getting faster transmission rates, particularly on receiving. If this is the last entry in this blog then it means that the early time worked out OK.

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