Day 37

Hi All

Just an update on the world around our small boat..

We are now back in the Doldrums. Its squally, with the wind and waves shifting now from the SE to the NE..

As we are heading North, it's turned from a Magic Carpet ride to a WRC rally car one. It's back to controlling the speed rather than maximizing it, as we guide our machine over the rough and bumpy aquatic road..

We should be out of the doldrums during the first part of the night, we hope.

In the natural world, of course the magnificent albatross have long gone, and been replaced by a variety of tropical seabirds.
Most of them seem uninterested in the boat, we just pass them by, rather than be the pied piper to an avian troop, like in the Southern Ocean..except for one large white booby bird, which flew just 5 or 10 metres above our heads today, staring down at us intently for 30 mins.

Of course there are many other flying creatures, launching themselves out of the water when they sense us coming, yes, there are flying fish everywhere.

Any avid readers of this blog might remember the strange apparition in the sky on Xmas Day night. It looked like a searchlight pointing into the sky.

Well, our brilliant shore router, Marcel van Triest, has discovered that it was indeed a comet, which has been named Comet Lovejoy, and it's a Kreutz comet, that will only be seen well in the Southern Hemisphere. It is one of the 'great' comets of recent times. We were so lucky to see it, and to see it unexpectedly, so that we could be both amazed, intrigued and confounded, like in earlier times. And we are also lucky to be around in 2011, when we can so quickly discover the fascinating reality of it, even from the centre of the Atlantic Ocean...

Brian