Thursday Evening, February 24, 2011
Shore crew extraordinaire Paul reports: Just off the phone with Diane. At 5:42pm she was 7 miles from Waypoint “2”, the turn to head south. Diane is sooooo glad that she’s done heading east. Once she makes the turn it’s kite up and hold on! This will be fun.
Presently she is footing in 11kts of breeze and doing about 6kts while hand steering. There has been cloud cover all day. Two reasons for hand steering. First is to conserve battery power. One battery is 50% and the other is full up. Second reason is that there has been lots of swells today and light breeze so it’s been a little hard with the auto pilot.
The plan is to hand steer through the night and keep the kite up until the breeze becomes to much to handle. She is predicting that the wind will pickup to around 20kts tonight.
Today was a nice day and fairly uneventful. Only two freighters were seen today and they were so far off there was no need to deploy the motor. What she did see was all kinds of trash. Tons of it, from bags and containers to plastic chairs and tables. What a shame.
TIm interjects: at 12:43pm Diane left me sentence before he satellites went over the horizon: Awesome night sail last night in the dark, lots of starts and phosphorescence and the boat just screaming along like a rocket-ship doing a nice 10kts.
Paul continues: Diane’s spirits are still high and maybe more so when she makes her turn. She sends a big hi out to all hers friends and fans and hopes you are enjoying her adventure. Speaking of friends Diane would like send the last tack & an upcoming jibe out to Brian and Tristan of who set her up with a sail repair backpack. All the right supplies, that came in handy on the becalmed day when she needed to fix a couple of small tears in the sail inventory.
Thats all for now. Diane needs to get a meal in before the turn and get everything ready for the spinnaker to go up.
February 25th, 2011 at 4:58 am
According to the tracker Mini 655 is moving along steadily on Leg 3. A kite at night and hand steering….now that’s a great ride. Have a safe night Diane. Thanks team.
PS….good to read about Diane’s sponsors.
February 25th, 2011 at 5:32 am
You write …”WHAT A SHAME”. I just finished reading today’s blog for Dutch sailor Laura Dekker who is presently stopped on the island of Bonaire and on a field trip today to a lighthouse she was also shocked by the “many kinds of plastic junk from the ocean” that was washed ashore there. And I have read the same thing from several solo circumnavigators this past year running into “plastic debris” fields in the middle of our oceans. Sad statement about what we are doing to our planet.
February 25th, 2011 at 8:27 pm
Speaking of all the shipping traffic Diane has encountered, here’s a link that shows the current position of all the ships in the world, using AIS I assume. Zoom in on the Bahamas by clicking on the map to get an idea of the traffic she’ll be dealing with, especially heading north up the gulf stream.
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml