Trade winds at last! The wind shifted North East last night and we have made our turn to the West. Can’t have much better sailing than this, with a fresh wind, small seas and every stitch of sail we have bent set the Ship is moving along marvellously. Trade wind passages are typically, in sailing […]
By Kate “Bob” Addison We have a well-used expression on the ship that something is very “Tuesday”. Tuesday being the vanilla of weekdays. Not traumatic like a Monday or fabulous like a Friday, just run-of-the-mill, routine and rather dull. Well, today is a Tuesday and on board Picton Castle our daily ship routine rolls along,
The break of dawn comes right on time here in the tropical South Atlantic about 800 miles east of the hump of Brazil. We rather expected it would. In these tropics, night to day shifts from deep night to bright shiny morning pretty swiftly, often with a brief brilliant blaze of sunrise. We are steering
The Picton Castle is six days and 730 miles out from Namibia, southern Africa. On a bright sunny day we sailed from Luderitz surrounded by the most barren of dusty desert with no sign of rain or green vegetation to be seen. And straight into a thick wet fog bank to rival the shores of
South Pacific south-east tradewinds, as pleasent and fine to sail in as they are, and depend on them we do to get across this ocean, are not quite as reliable as say South Atlantic tradewinds, which never seem to quit. Due to a low between two highs far to our south, yesterday the wind built
Mid-day, 20-16s/141-46w The Picton Castle is about 400 miles NE of Manga Reva sailing along in strong NNEly winds. Seas are moderate and not too lumpy. The ship is shortened down to upper topsails and still we>are making a comfortable and swift steady 7-8 knots. I suppose that we can expect the breeze to die
Passage To Rarotonga, Strong Tradewinds still with us #2 Read More »
21-12S / 139-23W The Picton Castle is sailing strong out here in the South Pacific Ocean – as I write we are under all plain sail in force 5 tradewinds blowing in from the NE. With Manga Reva well astern we are steering northwest around the infamous French nuclear test site atoll, Marururoa about 20
