[p]pjr4728
[s]
pos: 13 28.5n 55 28.4e
sp: 4.2
h: 290m
w: 8kn N, CC negligible, SS 0.5m N
d: 24/03/19 11:00 GMT+0300
Well, Mr Miller has reminded me that I haven't made a yit update in a while and fair enough.. I'd better jump to it!

Well, those winds became even more light and more fickle over the last couple of days, damnit! This resulted in a couple of sub-100nm days which have really hit the average. However, we ARE still heading in the right direction and the sun IS still shining. Wind is predicted to pick up, a little, soon too.. Even better!

AIS and radar watching is fun at night... We're largely attempting to travel as 'incognito' as possible, West of 65E, with our position transmitter and lights switched off except when either or both are absolutely necessary to save freaking out ships. Quite a bit of traffic is routing parallel and close to our track. When we leave our AiS off and those ships with their's on obviously clock us on radar (we thus register as only a 'blip', rather than full info that AIS would show, when we have it on transmit, of our position, heading, speed, size, flag, shoe size etc etc), they frequently attempt to 'disappear' by switching their system off transmit mode too..Even tho we would clearly be no risk whatsoever of collision.. My guess is that they are a tad nervous that our lowly speed may be a cunning ruse by the n'er do well's reputed to inhabit this area of sea!

Speaking of which, so far we have only seen 2 vessels that weren't clearly ships since leaving coastal waters off Kochi. They were both together too, on radar at 4nm from us not long before dawn this morning. Their speed suggested they were almost certainly simply fishing boats, but as their track was parallel to ours, to be on the safe side we did take a little diversion, just to make sure we were over the horizon by daybreak! Luckily when I spotted these on the radar, I'd just finished changing the oil again, in prep for entering Transit corridor... Hence we could just crank up ol' Perky and we didn't need to amble away pathetically under the 2kn wind!

PPS While we do have very limited means of hearing what's going on in the big wide world, we were told of the crazy cretin back home in Christchurch and the tragedy that befell so many innocent people as a result. Words fail really.. Truly a deluded, ignorant, pathetic excuse for a human being, whatever their imagined motives. That's only my (polite) opinion though!

(1280nm down-Av 116/day , 1317nm to go)

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