Change

Day 64

Noon Position: 51 06S 54 39W

Course/Speed: NE4

Wind: NW7

Sail: All plain sail, close hauled

Bar: 1003

Sea: W3

Sky: CLR

Cabin Temp: 67

Water Temp: 49

Miles last 24-hours: 104

Miles since departure: 8248

It’s been a day of change.

I woke to find Mo making slow way to the SW, the opposite of the course we had been following a mere two hours earlier. Winds had been light all night, and the main slatted now and then in the calms, but somehow the boat had managed to follow this transition, a perfect 180 degrees, without rattling the main even once or disturbing my slumber in the slightest. By the time I got us back on course, the wind had died altogether. We were becalmed until noon.

It is beautiful to be becalmed in that you get to see the world in a different way. The water of this ocean, as it lays prone beneath the sun, is blue but with a white or milky quality that reminds of the sea in glacial fjords. An oblong jelly with iridescent stripes just below the surface oozed by beyond the reach of my camera. A Black Browed Albatross, magically finding a breeze Mo could not, glided near again and again, then landed a stone’s throw away to preen. A shearwater slept at water top as we drifted. Now and then a bit of kelp, a reminder that land is not that far off.

It is also terrible to be becalmed because one is making no way, but soon the promised northwesterly arrived, very light at first but building. In the early afternoon, we entered a fog bank, the kind that blankets the water thickly but allows the sky to stay blue. I thought at first this might indicate an iceberg upwind, but the fog has grown heavier as the wind increases, and the radar looks back at me blankly with its big black eye.

Twenty three knots of wind now and more coming. We are making 8 knots over the ground close hauled; I have two reefs in the working jib and one in the main. The main will get another as soon as this is done.