Its a Dogs Life!

At 9:30 am on 03/02/2013 we were at 20’22.634’N  29’38.448’W.
According to the GPS we have 1824 nm to go before we see land.

Well yesterday was an eventful day.
We were visited by whales and dolphins, nearly side swiped by a cargo ship and caught lots of fish.

The visit from the whales in the morning was inspiring and really lifted our spirits.

The cargo ship just seemed to appear out of the mist around late afternoon.  I think we scared the captain as much as he scared us.  We hailed him on the radio. ‘We are the sailing ship on your port side.  Just want to make sure your intentions are NOT TO HIT US!’

The fishing was mad.   We got into a school of Mahi Mahi (dorado).  The male human was at first the most successful.  He got two small and one large, 6 pound, fish.  One of our biggest fish yet. They were striking fish.  As you battled them in, their backs radiated electric blue that seemed to shine through the water.

Then the male human made a fatal error.

He made the mistake of boasting, despite the fact the female had caught the most fish to date, he had caught the largest one yet.  He did not understand that there is a long maternal heritage in the female’s family that have an honor to uphold.  His jest was fighting talk to my female’s ancestors who decided to pay him back in spades.

After a half hour battle she proceeded to bring in a 13 pound blue fin tuna.

That was enough fish to clean for one day and they settled into their Mahi Mahi dinner when they were visited by a large pod of Atlantic Spotted dolphins: Stenella frontalis.  Young and old dolphin frolliced for an hour or so in the bow wave of the boat.  Do not worry video of both the whales and dolphins to come….in maybe two or three weeks.

The temperature is definitely warmer now and humid.  You do not need a coat on night watch any more, except last night when we got our first spits of rain.  The morning is also overcast and misty rainy. Hope it clears and we get to see the sun again.

SOA Day 7 Click for bigger picture.

Well we have turned west into the great unknown.
We have turned away from the last vestals of land and civilization in exchange for the open sea.
The sun, the moon, the sea and it’s creatures below become our new bed fellows.

I am not being too dramatic, am I?

We have been plodding along in the red haze and reached  16’40.597’N  27’16.684’W at 9am this morning after completing day 6 at sea.
The GPS says we will see land again in 1959nm.

We were getting tired of living in a ‘sand storm’ so we turned to wind and waves, dropped the main and rigged it up as a ‘poorman’s pole’, and reset the foresails out as goose winged.  We are now sailing dead down wind due west.
The twin head sail arrangement has lots of advantages.  It pulls the boat evenly through the water, so our auto-pilot had little work to do.  It is also easy to adjust the size of sail you have out.  Although with one ‘stunted’ spinnaker pole (see the swim it had on day one) we can not put out as much sail as we would like in lighter airs or rolly seas.
The ‘down wind roll’ does beat the ‘quarterly lurch’ as it is a bit smoother and predictable.

We were all up at 8am to what we thought was a pod of dolphins.  On closer inspection we realized we were being visited by whales.
Pseudorca crassidens: False Killer Whales
A pod of about thirty or forty individuals of all ages joined us for some play.  They bow rode, rolled and breached for over two hours despite my constant barking at them.  If you went below deck you could hear their squeaks and clicks as clear as if you had an underwater microphone.  A plural of sea birds tagged along obviously up for scraps during a hunt.

It was a joy to see them and we take it as a sign that all will be well on the crossing.

SOA Day 6 Click on image for clearer picture…

Hi all, I’m Steve, of uncle steve fame.. or not as the case may be.

I’m maintaining the guys website whilst they travel across the atlantic!

Spirit of Argo and Allegrini our boat, have been hosting our blogs (websites) through yachtblogs.com, trouble is yachtblogs.com as a company has been sold and it appears the new owners are not as service orientated as the last.

We have been experiencing lots of downtime, functionality and generally just really poor service. My last communication with them, they stated that in the near future they were going to cease support of the software on which our sites run.

Obviously were not happy and Cain is going to take this up with them when he gets a decent Phone line & Wifi connection when they land in the Caribbean.

Anyway,  as a precautionary measure and maybe the final solution, i have setup accounts with a larger more reputable hosting company for both spiritofargo.yachtblogs.com and our own site and are running a parallel site for Cain, April & Quinn

So please make a note of the new address and load it in your bookmarks, their email,  both boat and others remain completely unaffected.

I will continue to update both sites daily so don’t worry you wont miss anything on either site.

Steve (uncle)

The new address is:

www.spiritofargo.com

Trans-Atlantic  Day 5

This morning at 9am we were at N 21’03.33′ W 25’0.31′.
The GPS says we will see land in 2088 nm.

Not see land for 2088 nm, your joking.
Been going a little squirrelly on the humans for the past day.  Don’t know if I like the boredom for dogs.

I used to get a little ‘auntsy’ when waves broke on the side of the boat and down right ‘jumpy’ when water sprayed the cockpit.
But the humans found some old dodgers (cloth covers) that cover the guard rails from the back corner to just past the cockpit.
This has deflected lots of spray and made me more relaxed.  Normally they hate dodgers, because they restrict your view over the side (especially when the boat is healed over), but they made them detachable with shock cords and hooks.  This way they can put them up and down quickly on longer passages.  And this will be our longest for a while.

Yesterday morning when the sun rose it was dulled by an eary fog. The horizon was filled with it in every direction and it made you feel like you were sailing in a bubble, or the Bermuda triangle!  But it was not fog.  The wind was blowing maybe 20 knots and whipping up the waves as it does every day so far.  So what was this strange phenomena?
Then I looked at the still damp deck, warps (ropes), guard rail webbing and the sails.  They were all covered in the finest red SAND!
Sahara sand.  With the easterly winds the Sahara sand had been blown out to sea.  We continued in this mist all day, with chalky mouths and a muted red sun set.  We have woken to it again this morning.

We are hoping the winds and waves will ease a bit this afternoon and we will take down the main and run again on twin head sails goose winged and head west.  We want to start making progress west and we want to stop dying everything on our boat red.  Poor new sails.

Yesterday was just a few jobs on the boat for the humans, but they did catch me another tuna, but lost something big with a lurer.  It broke 130 lb test line!
Hope everyone is well and smiling.

SOA DAY 5 Progress, Click on image for better sized picture.

Our position at 9am this morning was: N 22’55.691′ W 23’05.288′
Our GPS put us 2206 nm from first land sighting of Martinique.

The humans have all this gadgetry to tell them how far away from land they are.  I keep it simple and sniff the air.
Right now I have been sniffing the air regularly hoping there might be land on the horizon.
We are moving into our 5th day at sea, and this is the longest passage we have done yet.
The humans tell me that we will be at sea for another 2 or 3 weeks!  I can’t even imagine how I am going to fill each ‘rolly’ day.

They did give me some excitement yesterday when they finally caught a fish.  Tuna for dinner tonight!
Other then that they do not do a lot more then cook, eat, read, sleep and clean up.

They say we will continue a little further south before turning west.  The winds already seem to be picking up, they just want a little more north in the easterly direction of them.

If you have any questions about life at sea, feel free to put them in the comments section and Aunt Helen and Uncle Steve will send them to me to answer. I have had two questions so far.
1) Is anyone traveling with us during this crossing?
No, we left later then most of the acquaintances we met a long the way.  A few that left earlier then us are in the Cape Verdes.  Check out our links to see Lochmaire and Limbo.
2) How do you have a bath at sea?
If it is not too rough we fill the sink with a little water and use a cloth.  On rough days the pressure through the sea cock forces the plug out and you just have to rinse the cloth out.  On really, really rough days (which luckly we have not had yet) we will resort to wet wipes.

Stay safe.

Click here for larger image……..

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