Day 47, April 22

We made slow progress during the late afternoon because the wind had died down and I was eventually forced to roll in some sail. Once again I had poor reception from Graham but managed to hear that I could expect a wind change to W at 15-20 kts at around 0000 UTC.

I woke up two hours into my sleep and found no change, with the boat still tracking slowly to the E. I woke up again at 2200 - about an hour from first light - and found that the wind had veered to the W and we were now headed more to SE. I did some quick calculations that confirmed that a gybe was warranted so I went topside and executed the gybe. With the deck light working better than ever and the reliable torch on my head these night operations were not much different from day ones. After the gybe I went below to the laptop and was pleased to see that we were on a course for Cape Naturaliste, south of Fremantle and north of Cape Leeuwin. It was at Cape Naturaliste now 590 miles away where I wanted to make landfall. We were moving along nicely at around 5.5 kts. After spending 20 minutes swapping bunks and turning the laptop around I tried to go back to sleep but dawn had broken and I had had enough sleep.

I downloaded a 5 day spot forecast for every 6 hours. I can expect 2 more days of good winds, followed by 18 hours of marginal winds, followed by a full day (25 April) of no sailing wind. After that are 24 hours of light but useful winds because the sea will be calm. If the forecast turns out to be accurate I should be well inside the 500 mile mark when I get becalmed, and if I get lucky the forecast of light winds on the 25th will change.

[I received a notice in the preamble from Sailmail when I connected at 0220 that they have not had connection between their server and the internet for 1.4 hours. That will explain any delay in either sending or receiving my messages. Hmm. I suggested such a notice to Sailmail after a similar outage at their Chile station that had me needlessly sending messages to their technical support because I had not received a grib file in about 2 days. The confusing part was that the connection between me and Chile was very good, but I didn't know that the station was isolated from the internet. Either Sailmail implemented this suggestion from an old computer manager war horse or the Aussie station is naturally efficient.]

Wow, Jim Putt and I finally managed to establish HF radio contact. The reception was poor because Jim was communicating from his boat no doubt surrounded by a forest of masts at the Fremantle Sailing Club, but it was a start.

The morning session with Graham was extremely difficult because there were two stronger voices talking on top of him. However, once again he received all of my information. When communication is difficult I say everything twice and I'm glad to say that I haven't had a failure yet - amazing considering that he's over 4,000 miles away.

At 0800 UTC our 24 hour sailing numbers were:

POS 37S08, 105E01
NND 103 nm
DMG 4250 nm
DTG 612 nm

According to the spot forecast I could expect another 36 hours of good wind and I was looking forward to blowing right through the 500 mile mark.

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