“The doldrums are somewhere you have to go to get to where you are going, you would only go there once just to see what it was like, but each round the world attempt has two doldrums crossings. For those chasing an existing record they can be the making or the breaking of it. For us setting up a new record time, we will always be able to say ‘ah but we had the doldrums bad on the way back, that’s what it feels like now, that we have the doldrums bad. In reality this is what the doldrums is, to have it bad we would have to be here for a week and we have only had it for 14 hours or so. Such is the quick changing of the pace that yesterdays fair to good predictions have become a tough crossing. Right now, an hour after dawn has broken there is a landscape of rain clouds around us for 270 degrees, these mainly are sucking up wind and leave very little behind making for huge light patches and rain. The good news if there is any is that the remaining 90 degrees of clearer sky is broadly ahead of us. So heading north will eventually take us into new breeze from the north west and we will be on our way. Just an hour into the calms yesterday we did have a light north west wind and although we knew that it would not be the wind we were waiting for, it was at least something to hope for! Sure enough it changed a few minutes later and normal service was resumed.
From Onboard Musandam Today “Day 61 of our food bags is back to warm weather food, as the food is based on the 80 day pace boat (she is still coming out of the south) we are well ahead of schedule, but have decided to stick to the days as they come, but it does mean that today we get slightly smaller meals (less kcal) and some light weather breakfast things, like Krisproll dried bread rolls are back on the menu and tomorrow everyone’s favorite snack makes a reappearance, Biltong, dried meat, great to chew on, great to add to now familiar tasting freeze dried food, also a new bag of Alpen cereal. Hooch has a new recipe for making that his number one breakfast, alpen, hot water and powdered milk.
After the previous night’s flying fish, Mohsin used the light airs to drop the fishing lure into the sea – nothing, we believe our lure only works on Kiwi fish. There have been a few sea birds passing us by, but apart from that no other sea life for a while. Loik and I were remembering the doldrums near to Singapore and agreed they were much the same (both Loik and Charlie were onboard Musandam when she was B&Q/ Castorama for the Asian record circuit established between March and May 2006), however here there are no fishing boats, where as in Asia there was more than you could count. I guess as we close on Muscat we’ll see more life at sea, we have seen a couple of container ships, but that has been it.
650 miles north west of the Seychelles with the Chagos Archipelago 570 miles to the north east, trimaran Musandam currently situated at 12° 45.6799 S / 062° 23.4017 E. See latest position on the Race Tracker.
Just under 3000 nautical miles ahead of 80 day virtual pace boat – a good advantage as the pace boat keeps moving at just over 280 miles per day relentlessly, no windless zones, no bad sea state it just keeps going.”