Day 2

A very pleasant, albeit a bit slow, day with seas of about 1m and winds from behind of around 10 – 14kts.  The current (as in now) ocean current (as in sea flow) forecast shows a “U” shape loop with up to 2k of current off the east coast of Madagascar. The eastern leg (about 100 nm offshore) flows north (against us) and the leg closer to shore (about 60 nm offshore) flows south. Our objective for today is to cut across the top of the north flowing leg and get into the south flowing bit – that’s the plan so let’s hope the grib files are correct and from reports of other boats it seems the forecast is not far out. We had around 1 knot positive current with us all day yesterday until around midnight and since then nothing.  We gybed onto starboard mid morning and have remained goose winged. 

We’ve seen a couple of ships on the AIS but nothing to worry about.  No cetaceans (we think yesterdays ones were probably Frasers dolphins) and just one tropic bird. Everything reported fine on the daily check and no flying fish!

Date and time: 23rd October 09.30 local (GMT + 4 hrs) 

Position:  S23:40:674 E049:46:703

24 hours distance:  163nm