It's funny how weekends have no meaning out here. Monday is just as special as Friday. It's sad that most people spend two or three days a week just wishing those days were over. There will come a time in our lives when we wish we had all those Mondays and Tuesdays back.
We lost our wind last night and had to run the engine all night. We have used 1/10 of our fuel supply, but have not yet achieved 1/10 of the distance. So we must start being a little more prudent with fuel. We did, however to spend more fuel than average for the first 300 miles as the doldrums are reputed to have long periods of dead calm.
We have done all the southing we want for now (we are at 3 degrees south and 94 degrees west) as there is a huge rectangular area that seasoned sailors say are prone to sudden squalls, and therefore to avoid (3 - 8 degrees south and 95 - 108 degrees west). We are pretty close to the north-eastern corner of this zone and figure we would just ride the north end of it until we can safely head south again.
Now that we are heading west, we have the wind at our stern, which means a nice and smooth ride for the next 840 miles (ignoring squalls). We put the whisker pole up this morning (which we have no mastered) to catch some of this aft-wind and are getting some 5.3 knots with just the Genoa. We'll try going wing-on-wing later this morning (both main and genoa up, on opposite sides of the boat).
****9:00AM****
We finally saw our first whale! We saw this large turquoise mass in the water moving against the current. At first we we unsure what the heck it was, it looked like a moving shoal. Then we saw it pop up and shoot its blow hole. I couldn't determine what kind of whale it was, but it was HUGE. It came right across the bow of our boat, we almost hit the damn thing.
The GoPro is absolutely terrible at taking shots of things that aren't within 15 feet of you, but here it is (post-zoomed):
This shot was only 50 feet from the boat too. By eye, we saw it perfectly. I'll try next time for an underwater shot. This camera seems to be pretty good at those.
****2:00PM****
Woo! I had a second whale sighting in the same day! I saw two medium-sized whales off our stern, about 50 metres away, heading south like the last one. These whales looked very similar to Orcas, with the big dorsal fin, but were more light-grey in colour and had a patch over their eye.
****
It started to rain in the evening. We decided to bring the whisker pole down before dark.
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