Offshore blog: West of Casablanca

It's time! I see a possible window of wind and I'm going for it. There is a phrase in sailing I believe, a phenomenon known as "Dock rot". When the idea of staying in port starts to feel comfortable and the bigger sense of the overall trip starts to lose momentum. It can, if left unchecked, go on indefinitely. Not wishing to lay myself subject to this malaise yet sensing it's building presence, it's time to haul anchor and get back out into the ocean. Leaving Sagres with some sense of exhilaration we find the wind....and a thick area of fog. Visibility is less than 200metres, it's getting dark and we are crossing a major shipping lane! But we have wind!

I can hear the horns of the ships, there's one getting closer, a long blast, booming out into the night. The lane is about 25 miles wide in total. It could be a long night!

The wind lessened and I had no choice but to scuttle through the dark foggy bit on the motor. Relying completely on my AIS(Automatic Identification System) I play what feels like a strange and eerie game. The readout on my radio tells me my Closest Point of Approach given the bearings and speeds of mine and the other vessel. If it tells me 2 miles is the closest we'll come to hitting each other, well, then I can relax. If it tells me it's 200 metres, that's the time to decide what to do, either turn or slow down, or speed up. Halfway across the lanes, we left the fog and I could relax, and as a bonus the wind returned! Cut engine, sails up, swish swash swoosh

I think I ate 5 chocolate bars and a pot noodle that night and paid the consequences with a bad stomach. My boat is growing the pervasive sweet odour of onions. I have about 30 left in the forepeak, alongside the potatoes and the oranges. Food generally has been working out well. Daily lunch of raw cabbage, raw carrot, tomato and the last of the cheese, which hasn't killed me yet despite being out of the fridge and stewing in its own juice for 3 weeks! Dinner generally seems to involve a carbohydrate, some veg and some cured sausage, chorizo type of thing. Everything I bought was scrutinised for its shelf life in an ambient environment. Cured sausage is not something I would usually eat but it's tasty and hopefully filling in on the protein department. I bought far too many sweet things and I hope I won't get fat from over eating them! This mornings events included the discovery of two small squid on the deck. I've no idea how they got there but they were dead by the time I saw them. I put them back overboard, no doubt a breakfast for some other seagoing creature.

I started to think about the sheer depth of 2.5 miles of water under the hull, and what creatures lived there, and then about giant squid, the size of the boat...best not go there! This morning a mackerel sky, some cirrus, a cloud bank, a wind shift and now overcast but making good progress south. I thing we're about 100 nm from the coast, about level with and west of Casablanca. I worked out last night that its about 50 days from here to north east Brazil. It's a strange sensation to think I will be sat here everyday, my world reduced to this small lump of plastic, sailing through eternity with nothing in view but sea and clouds, and the sun, moon and stars.

I plan to stop in the canaries to take on water and some green veggies, that should be in about 5 days time.

Life without phone, without internet actually feels kind of purifying in some way. I have some books to read, and the ocean to gaze at, whether under the blue skies or the stars. And I pray the wind stays favourable.

(Posted by Nick. Whilst at sea Dan has a text-only email facility on his sat phone which he's used to email me this blog and his position.)