We generally had a slow night, crawling up along the Brazilian coast, the wind ranged from 14 knots in the light patches
to 36 knots in the squalls, and ocillated by as much as 60 degrees.
Again, we passed a lot of fishermen , all with their single bright white light on board, perhaps to attract the fish, but they can be seen for a long way offf. Some of these boats are really small and a long way off shore, perhaps 15miles or so.
Brave men.
We read the emails during the morning and did the blog, great to hear from Robbie Andrews again, along with Margaret How, Susan Mangan, Oyster, Arnaud, Richard, Larry and Vera in N.Z. Stefan,and many others. Keep the emails comming,
The wind kept comming and going all day and we kept in contact with " Voyaguer" on the VHF. We set a northerly course to take us away from the coast as we want to be at least 100 miles off shore when we reach the Amazon River.We also think that there will be more wind to the North.
We changed our rig set up many times during the day as the wind kept changing, and it was too volitile to try putting any spinniker.
Lunch consisted of Aileens " Cottage Pie " again today , and it tasted as good as yesterday. We all took plenty of naps, or as Donal would say ..............zzzzzizzzzz. Actually , we had a great email from the said same man a couple of days ago, and are happy to report he is doing well. you may recall Donal had a crash on his scooter in Roratonga, the Cook Islands, goish it seems so long ago now,
On that matter, here we are now on our last leg of the rally, It seems so long ago when we left Crosser on our way to do this event. We really did not know what we were about to experience, The sheer scale of the trip and the distances between stops almost looked impossible, now we think nothing of sailing 2,000 miles.
We have sailed 31,500 miles since that faithfull day we left Cork, 24th June 2009.
21.00hrs We have travelled 168 miles in the last 24 hrs. We even had to do almost 2 hours motoring , never a dull moment.
As darkness fell, we were goose winging nicely along, happy out. Skipper stood out onto the aft dect to look over the awning , as we often do at night , view whats ahead, etc, suddenly , this lovely sea bird that was roosting on the awning flapped its wings and basically suggested to skipper to "buzz off " Skipper got a fright, not expecting this bird , especially on the awning, they often land on the Rib, or on top of the mast or perch on the crosstrees, but this is a first, and, and, he remained there while the boss did his buisness ..... A cool Dude Bird....................
Around midnight, we had some lightning, very close to the boat, but funny thing, no thunder.... We settled into the night once more,
Thats all for now,
Signed :- Stephen Hyde ( Skipper )