Merry Christmas !!

With the right wind conditions I'll will be in Antigua by Christmas Day, or at least that's the plan. Then I'm thinking four days of sun, sand and the sort of Sea Breezes you drink (in moderate amounts of course), before flying back to London for the mother of all New Year's knees ups. I'm flying out to Gibraltar this Thursday (30th) and then we'll slip silently out of the harbour on Saturday and wave goodbye to our last shower for 3 or 4 weeks. Our precise route is yet to be agreed but the tentative plan is to go south from Gibraltar to the Canaries and then carry on down to Cape Verde which is inside the Tropic of Cancer. This leg should take about 10 days and by the time we reach the Cape temperatures should have risen to about 26 degrees Celsius. We'll then hang a right, point the boat West and have approximately 2,150 nautical miles of Atlantic Ocean between us and Antigua.

I was looking at an Atlantic chart the other day (never let it be said I don't know how to enjoy myself), some of the depths in the middle are about 8,000 metres which is nearly as deep as Everest is high. Traditionally December is when all Tropical Storm (hurricane) activity has ceased and I'm certainly hoping that we don't encounter one, but it's been a very quiet hurricance season so far this year so it's either a low year, or they're late. We'll only be using the stars and the sun to navigate our way across by using a sextant, like this chap.

The purpose of this is so that we can navigate in the event that all of our electronic navigational equipment fails or our generator (produces electricity) packs up, which is not beyond the realms of belief. We practised this a few weeks ago when we did Ocean Navigation Theory and it works. We went over to Sandown beach took some sun sights and then drove over to Ventnor and did some more. There are then numerous different calculations that have to be done on paper but eventually, and much to my surprise, it does give a position on the earth which is very accurate. This skill could be very useful in the future, everyone relies on GPS (car SatNav systems use this) but first of all it's owned by the Americans and they can either turn the accuracy down or turn it off completely and secondly it can be affected by Sun Spots. GPS has been made less accurate in the past, usually when the US is at war and when GPS was invented it was done at a time of low Sun Spot activity but this activity is due to increase in a dramatic way over the next decade so GPS could become less accurate as a result.

Enough about astro-navigation but I do find it a fascinating subject, especially when it comes to the stars and how mariners navigated before modern systems (or even an accurate time piece) had been invented, but I'll save that for smokey pub and a few beers - you lucky people.

I said I would post some pictures in my last update but I seem to be having some trouble doing that at the moment.

Here's a video of the fire fighting training that we did a few weeks ago. One of my colleagues did it. It's about 5 minutes long, there's two bits that are worth watching. Everyone knows that if you try to put out a chip fat fire with water you'll get a fireball but it's demonstrated on this video with impressive results. We all saw the amount of water that was put on the fire and it was no more than half a mug full. The second is an aerosol in a fire, it goes off with quite a bang.

I don't know if we are stopping at the Canaries or at Cape Verde but if we do I'll try to find an Internet cafe and do a quick update.

Take care, Merry Christmas and I'll see you in 07.

Paul

Schools & Fools

Those are the only people sailing at this time of year, especially outside of the relatively safe confines of The Solent. It was, therefore, quite apt that on a recent sail across to Cherbourg we only encountered two other yachts in the whole 130 mile round trip. One yacht was another UKSA boat out training and the other was clearly a fool. Since then we've been out in all sorts of weather. Today for example we sailed from Lymington back to Cowes with the wind reaching 55 knots at times which is a good Force 9. Whenever it's rough, windy or throwing it down with rain and we see another yacht, someone is bound to say "schools and fools".

The trip across to Cherbourg was interesting. I may have mentioned in previous posts that we did a Radar course a while back which at the time was really good fun but when it came to sailing across the busy shipping lanes in the English Channel, the training was invaluable. The radar allows us to track up to a maximum of 10 "targets" in order for us to work out if we are in danger of a collision. We thought that 10 targets would be more than enough but when we were actually in the shipping lanes we wanted to track about 15 at times. As usual the business of collision avoidance at night kept us on our toes, we had a few nervous moments to say the least. The skipper was not one of these people that breezed through high pressure situations with an air of calmness - oh no. He seemed to opt for the "instill as much panic in my crew as possible and genuinely seem like life is about to end horribly" style of leadership. It was good to see the contrast between experienced skippers, which we'd had up to this point, and the one that we had for this sea phase though. As is quite often the case you learn more when something goes wrong than when everything works like clockwork.

The yacht that we had for that sea phase was called a Sweden 42 and it's definitely the best make of yacht I've sailed on, apart from Contessa's of course ;) I helmed it for about 2 hours coming across from Cherbourg in a strong wind and good size sea - it sailed fantastically. It's probably the most fun I've had at the wheel of a boat. I've just found out today that I've got the same yacht for my Yachtmaster exam in January, so I'm really pleased with that. I've also found out that I am being examined with perhaps two of the best sailors in our course, one's a Frenchman and the other is Polish (I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere). The exam is a two day grilling in which we take the examiner out in the yacht and he can ask us to do anything that's in the syllabus and ask us questions on anything we've been taught. It's the sort of driving test at sea but lasts for two days. The exam is on the first weekend in January so by the time you've all got back to work after the Christmas break I'll hopefully be a Yachtmaster.

I've spent the last 10 days or so "self skippering". As the name suggests we are given a yacht on a charter basis, without a skipper and we're let loose like toddlers learning to walk. I am pleased to report that we didn't bend it and we didn't hit any other vessel. We did however, ensure that our day was done by 6pm latest, and if we weren't in front of a big fire with pint by 6:15, we'd give ourselves a serious talking to. It was a great couple of weeks, when we needed to make hard decisions (or even easy ones) and there was no one to turn to, we found that we could in fact deal with any situation we were faced with. We lost our engine 3 times, we were faced with some seriously windy conditions and we weren't sure whether to order crisps or peanuts with our 4th pint but it all worked out just dandy.

In a week's time I will be in Gibraltar to meet up with the yacht we're crossing the Atlantic on and then a few days later, we're off. We're hoping to be in Antigua for Christmas Day and then we've got 4 days there before we fly back to London, just in time for New Year's Eve. I'm feeling excited about the trip but also a tad anxious - I guess that's fairly normal though.

I am writing this from an Internet cafe and unable to upload photos, however, I am back in my shore based accommodation tomorrow so I'll put some pictures on then.

I'll update this once more in the next week and then not until I get to Antigua.

TTFN