Kelpie - Saturday 1 December 2018

> 16:15.5N 40:54.9W
>
>
> Noon to noon run: 152 miles. Our wake from Mindelo is now 900 miles long,
> leaving 1300 miles to St Vincent. Fish remain a theme, including a large
> flying one that walloped into the sprayhood last night, alarming Sarah and
> David. We are a long way from land but still seeing sea birds, and indeed
> a novel one just circled us that looked like a parakeet but pure white,
> with a thin tail as long as its body and the appearance of being lost.
>
> We however are not lost, being within a whisker of our great circle course
> after instincts to resume a comfortable and fast broad reach at dusk and
> then a dead run at noon both proved highly profitable. The relative lack
> of repairs, sail changes and television has allowed us to deploy the
> skipper's O Level trigonometry into an iPad program by which we assess the
> Velocity Made Good consequences of current and prospective courses and
> post rationalise our hunches: great fun and so far surprisingly accurate.
> A CoSine is apparently the operative bit of maths. A VeeSine is also
> handy, for communicating down the length of the boat if sail changes are
> fraught, but that is not maths.
>
> Even more fun is another new program to calculate our race position
> adjusted for Time Correction Factors. TCFs are the yachting community's
> way of making people who spend disproportionately vast amounts of money on
> big boats regret deeply that they have. Sailing with a Discovery 55, for
> example (yours for seven figures), we find that our monohull rally
> position improves from fourth place to second, ahead of them. But it's a
> long way to go.
>
> Rollin' Like Rawhide
>
>
> The Kelpie Crew