For Berrimilla's first circumnavigation, the International Space Station
and the North West Passage, go to www.berrimilla.com
and www.berrimilla.com/tng

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Guy Fawkes in another universe

0700/5th position 0508 02441 trip 110/24
Almost exactly half way between the corner of S. America and Ascension Island. Progress, but slow. Wet, lumpy and uncomfortable. Arse-bone complaining to the Ass.
Nocturnal visitor returned last night - not in the bird book and just possibly a land bird - brownish all over, lighter head, dark eye patches wingspan about 40 cm long thin black beak no hooked end. It departed when I had to put the second reef in and get soaked for my troubles.
It's been said that we sem to be enjoying this one rather more than the others - probably right, no deadline, we're going somewhere on the way, and we certainly haven't got to the hard bit yet. I think that's about 3 weeks away, down near Tristan and then all the way to Hobart. We'll see - it has certainly been astonishingly easy so far and I'm sure the Examiner is polishing her whip

Travels for an Aunt

1900/4th position 0415 02433 still headbanging the current and creeping westward.

A friend wrote to say that some years ago she had scattered her Aunt's ashes on the Seine in Paris and wondered how long it might take for them to get back to Boston, where she had lived. Ann, here is a whimsical adventure for her, laughing all the way - left or right into the Channel depending on the tide, up into the top of the Gulf Stream (a bit iffy, that one - cd be stuck around the British Isles for years) and on into the Arctic Circumpolar drift past Spitzbergen and eventually down through the Bering Sea into the clockwise flow of the N Pacific, down the North American coast, across the Pacific from California to the islands east of Indonesia,through Indonesia (iffffyyyy!) to the Indian Ocean, anti-clockwise down past Madagascar and into the South Circumpolar Current across the Southern Indian and Pacific Oceans, through Drake Passage past Cape Horn, NE across the Atlantic into the Benguela, up the coast of Africa, across in the Equatorial to the W. Indies and back into the bottom of the Gulf Stream past Boston. With a few probable diversions on the way! Short cut might be the Agulhas current around southern Africa and into the Benguela...Another short cut perhaps going south from the Pacific down the coast of Australia and into the South Circumpolar south of Hobart. Lots of possibilities!