There's a pretty strong current that runs north to south along the southeast coast of Africa, and we've long since set a waypoint about a hundred miles off the coast, a bit north of our goal, to help take this into account.
To make things a tad more complicated, though, when weather moves in from the south - particularly if it has decent winds blowing from the south, i.e. against that current - it kicks up a very rough sea.
Just such a weather system is moving into the area, so we've adjusted our speed to hit the next waypoint *after* the winds have passed and the seas calm down. (Between the weather forecasts the WARC folks send, and our own ability to download detailed weather data for our own analysis, we have a remarkable amount of information available, really. Casey continues to marvel and compare it to his first Atlantic crossing back in 1972 where things were just a bit different! See http://www.passageweather.com for details.)
So we're in the unusual situation of needing to slow the boat down, rather than the usual pile-on-the-sail attitude... we're now noodling along with jib and reefed main under cloudy skies and scattered light showers. Everything's been tidied and stowed for weather (though we're not actually expecting that much) and we've taken advantage of the mellow seas and wind to do some laundry and similar chores. The off-watches even watched a movie this afternoon.
Another unexpectedly quiet day on the WT. After yesterday's wildlife extravaganza it's been pretty quiet in that department, too, just a modest number of birds, and one extremely lost dragonfly. (The last has us really puzzled. Perhaps he was a stowaway since Reunion? No way to tell, but he's welcome to hitch a ride anyway.)
WT over and out.
5 Nov 2010 15:10 UTC (17:10 local WT time)
27 31.387 S
38 59.462 E
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