Sunday 15th January 2017
There was something about those graveyard-shift watch crew. Either they had a knack for attracting weird events or they were good at fabricating whoppers. Max and Nick made the outlandish claim that at approximately 11:00pm UTC they came under a vicious aerial attack that was sustained for almost two hours. They said that each of them had to duck for cover as they risked being scalped by an enemy with the cruelest of intentions. The perpetrator of this villainous act was a very large dark brown bird that initially circled the yacht for a good hour while weighing up the odds of its prey being able to defend themselves and then after landing briefly on the spray dodger it launched its attack on the hapless pair innocently trying their best to steer the boat through the night. None of this would be remotely believable and one would suspect those involved as having been smoking a banned substance if it weren’t for a witness who corroborated the story. Jarrod had also been on deck and witnessed the whole saga, staying up with them as he feared for their wellbeing under the circumstances. On reflection later Max suggested that maybe the bird was seeking somewhere to nest and had spotted Jarrod’s beard as a suitable option. By all accounts of the description of the attacking bird it may well have been a Frigate bird. We had just been passing about 100 nautical miles below Ilha da Trinidade at the time and it is possible that such a bird that was resident on the island was indeed looking for something to plunder. Known as the pirates of the ocean their modus operandi is to soar high up where it can spot another bird that has just managed to catch a fish so that it can swoop down on it and pester it to the point where it drops its catch which the Frigate bird then grabs for itself. They are a very common sight along the coastline approaching Rio de Janeiro. There were quite a few other birds on the water as we started to sail past the islands.
Another strange thing happened while passing Ilha da Trinidade. Max discovered that his WhatsApp and sms messages had all just been delivered to his phone. Our GSM range extender on the boat was clearly working very well and we had previously considered its maximum range to be 40 miles, not the 100 that it must have just achieved. Max quickly turned off his data roaming to avoid a nasty bill when he returned home as he planned to use wifi in Rio to collect all his outstanding messages.
In the morning we hoisted the white spinnaker and sailed with it throughout the day, including during several minor squalls that saw the wind briefly pick up to a maximum of 24 knots on occasion. With the crew more familiar with sailing the boat now and understanding her limits and just how to deal with sudden gusts we could sail a little less conservatively and push the boat a bit. Sailing her like this we managed to pass the catamaran Leila B which we had been shadowing the past couple of days, leaving her to disappear over the horizon behind us as she on the other hand dropped her spinnaker and seemed to take quite a long time to put up her main sail and genoa. By lunchtime we had reached the waypoint we had set that would have us change direction slightly and head straight for Rio. We had worked out from the GRIB weather files that we no longer needed to stay so far north as the high pressure systems were no longer a threat. We anticipated that we would be knocking off the miles very quickly now that we could finally take the great circle route to our destination.