Day 5 – 29.01.26

Another beautiful sunrise this morning, a bit more cloudy than the last few days. I think we are finally out of the big tankers shipping lane, they are becoming more and more scarce, which is a good thing. Thanks to our AIS beacon they see us as well as we see them on our electronic chart. It is quite crazy to think about the amount of container ships constantly sailing on our oceans, some of them close to 300m in length and loaded as high as a 15 storey building, MSC and Maersk being explicitly written on the side of these boats. The depth of the water right now is 4750m so nearly as deep as it will get. I know there’s place in the Atlantic where you are closer to humans in the ISS than on land, do you know where that is ? Maybe someone can send us the coordinates and we can see where we are in comparison.

The swell is following us so we are going a steady 6 kts in 15kts winds. We could fly the Oxley but the goosewinging (so flying the genoa on a whisker pole and opening the main in opposite directions) is still a winning combo. We will keep the Oxley for lighter winds. We haven’t spotted any sealife today, just a solitary petrel flying around us this morning.

Today we baked a banana bread, again, came out delicious ! Getting the little things done out here takes a whole new dimension, nothing is easy in the galley, things are constantly rolling around which becomes nerve racking but makes it even more rewarding when whatever you were making tastes good ! Just writing this in the cockpit is already challenging, I have the impression we will be very fit around the waist by the time we reach Brazil. It’s like doing a full body workout just to be out of the sleeping position, you’re always balancing out the rolling and holding yourself with one or two hands. But such are the pleasures of being out here, definitely worth it ! We filmed some funny moments inside the boat, retrospectively it will be funny to watch the struggle to get around inside while everything around you is rocking about.

Tonight we started making a translation chart between french and english nautical terms, because JB only knows the french words we decided to write the translations out, as I only know the english ones. Amazing how the only word that’s nearly the same is « boom » (baume in fr), all the rest, is very different.

Starting my watch now at 21:30 GMT+1, we changed times tonight. Saint Helena Island is GMT+0 so we will need to go back another hour in a few days when we reach Greenwich. Another great evening in the company of a nearly full moon reflecting on the waves (you can see it in the picture below).