Tuesday - 12 June 2018

Tonight it was a much brighter and  a more starry night. I had sight of a bright satellite to steer by initially and then a conveniently placed line of three stars to help guide me.

We had Fernando Alonso with us!

 The Watch system we are using means that you don’t get to be on watch for the same time periods each day, so for example, there is one watch period that is all in darkness, and the two watches alternate who is on at this time. The other watch had the all darkness watch tonight, but it clouded over during the night and they lost site of the stars.

Coming on deck at 3:45 was a struggle, and there were 2 on my watch who were having to work at staying awake. You always seem to perk up when it is your turn to drive, but after that, it is even more difficult to keep awake.

On Saturday Harry had asked if I thought we would see dolphins and I had confidently said you. Fortunately my confidence was not misplaced and we have seen dolphins each day. Today we have had at least 4 pods. 2 stayed with us for long periods, playing in the bow wave. We watch entranced until they get bored of us and vanish as quickly as they arrived.

In the evening, we had something to trump the dolphins. We saw a plume of water being blown into the air. When it was repeated, we realised that it was a whale, heading in the other direction, about 300 metres to the side of us.  We could see its back as it came to the surface to breathe and a small fountain resulting from every breath. It heading serenely on, completely un-phased by us.  Afterwards we questioned what some of the depth sounds meant. We knew that we were in 4000plus metres of water and most of the time the depth sounder could not get a reading. Every so often a shallow reading would show. Was this the boat being in a critical depth of water and the echo sounder hearing the result of a previous ping, or was there shoal of fish or something bigger swimming under the boat. We will never know.

Distance covered today	159	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	537	nautical miles
Distance covered 2018	1257	nautical miles

Steve (and Tricia)