Nov 24th, Position: 20°24.230N/26°20.046W
Yesterday we set the shipsclock another hour back so the first watch, mine, was an hour longer. But that was okay since it was only one hour... The new system is a bit more complicated but we all feel it works better. We all get to sleep some more during the night and that does make a difference :-)
Taking sightings is going better too. Yesterday Marc and I did took two sightings and plotted our position. We came as close as 8 nm! Also Rutger took some sightings and his plotting was very accurate too :-)
In the mean time, our average speed has gone up to 7.5 kts. That's good for over 180 nm in 24 hrs!!
We haven't seen any ARC yachts yet. I guess most of them aren't fast enough to catch up our head start.
What we did see though were two whales. Jur spotted them as they were cruising about 200 m behind us. Rutger tried to film them but on the camera you can't really see them :-(
We also get to see a lot of stars at night. Most of the time it's very clear. The good thing is that you can point on a star. That's way better then looking at the compass the whole time :-)
With help of 'Stellarium' on my laptop we now know where Betelgeuze, Rigel, Aldebaran and Capella are :-) I could steer at Sirius for quite a while last night. And of the planets, Jupiter is always there.
Last night Marc also saw a huge freighter or containership coming at us with over 20 kts... They also saw us according to the sea-me.... They had to give way but didn't seem to do so. So Marc called Jur and me on deck to get ready to gibe. Then they sort of stopped but still holding course... and gave me 5 flashes, meaning: alert, wake up!! We gibed .. What had happened probably, is that our echo was misinterpreted. On radar we look like a freighter too with the sea me.... As a freighter we should have give way but we didn't... so they stopped their engines... getting a bit pissed too I guess. Being a yacht and sailing however, they should give way but since they had no clue on what we were, they didn't... They could have known though. We didn't have a steaming light and our speed was 'only' 7kts. Anyway, after they passed they went full throttle to make up the lost time...
Early this morning Rutger spotted a – empty – horse shoe, probably lost by a yacht ahead of us. So we might have been caught up after all...
