Technicalities - English version

Dear all,

It has come to my attention that maybe I skipped an essential introductory chapter to this blog explain technical stuff regarding our route, sailing instruments, etc. So this post will be dedicated to that, to make sure that we are all in the same boat (hehe).

Some (potentially) interesting statistics:
True heading: 90 (E) except for some wind variations, not expected today.
Actual position (I usually never include it because it can be checked, real time, through the SPOT tracking): I:40 12' N; L: 66' 6' W
Miles per day: avg. 160
Total miles sailed since leaving the Cheseapeake bay: 650
Avg. speed since Hudson canyon: 8.5 knots
Min speed: 0 knots (wed, july 2, around 11am)
Max speed: 14.5 knots (thur, july 3, around 11am)
Water consumed till now: 8 gal. from bottled water, and one of the three tanks, empty due to unknown reasons
Electricity used: 520Ah, recharged 350 Ah with the generator

NAVIGATION
Since leaving the bay, we have attempted to follow orthodromic (?? i dont have a dictionary here!) heading of 73 degrees, adapting to the wind conditions. During the first and half days, we were subject to the continuous wind rolls and specially to the effect of variable currents (we still have to catch the Gulf stream). Due to the lack of wind in certain areas and thanks to the information received through the software Ocens weather, it was recommended to head north to catch better wind. That is what we did and it seemed it's going well so far. This afternoon we plan to do another weather forecast.

INSTRUMENTS
To navigate during the day, we use the boat's GPS system, the compass, and we all that, we depend heavily of the auto-pilot. The auto-pilot is usually programmed respect to the wind, so if there are wind rolls, the heading is adjusted to there is no need for us to be constantly managing the sails (the position of the boat remains constant with respect to the wind, or thats what we pretent to a certain extent).
We also have an auxiliary GPS connected through the laptop to the RayTech Navigator. On top of this, we have the SPOT GPS, which is completely independent (not used for any navigation purposes). It is usually outdoors and while the "tracking" mode is on, it sends a signal every 10 minutes and maps it into the Google map that you are able to see. Yesterday, there seems to have been a gap of 3 hours without signal. We were not aware of this and probably was due either to us (might have forgotten to activate the tracking, which is required every 24 hours) or maybe due to a system error.
The depth founder stopped working when we reached 200 feet...
And finally the radar, which is very useful at night and to give us an idea of the size of the clouds coming towards us.

WATCHS
There are 3 double watch turns of 3 hours each: one during the day (very chill) and another one during the night (very strict). The hours and the people in each are fixed so we can get used to sleeping during the same hours. From 10 to 1, Josian and Juan are watching, from 1 to 4, Pepe and Marta, and from 4 to 7, Borja and Luis. When we started the trip, the watches all started an hour earlier, but since nobody was ever awake by 6am and there was usually still people awake by 9pm, we moved all the shifts one hour later.

TIME
Since we keep moving forwards against the time zones, Pepe reminds us every time we cross 15 degrees to adjust our watches. In this way, we are always operating with our corresponding time. Now we are 5 hours behind Spain and 1 hour ahead EST.

MEALS
The master chef behind what we all eat is Luis. He did an extraordinary job of designing the menus and stock up food for the trip. There is almost nothing missing (maybe butter?). We even have biscottis for tea time (though we still havent made any tea), pancake mix and syrup, thousands of snack bars, and many, many, many, many cans of anything. From time to time, we also treat ourselves to a typical spanish "aperitivo" with jamon, chorizo, lomo, etc :)

FREE TIME
Though I was suppously in charge of this, it is true that the crew is mostly busy keeping up with the sails, cleaning, cooking.
During the true free time, crew usually spends the time chatting, reading or playing Nautical trivial, very contested by the way.
Today, Borja had a great idea: the Badum TV. He has decided to tape an episode per day. Today he taped how we discussed how to avoid collision with a freighter. A freighter from Netherlands that we didnt see coming since we were too busy cleaning the deck.

Well, i think thats all for now, hope it was helpful!

best to all!

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