Less than a thousand! Hmm what to say about the last couple of days? Sometimes it’s good to have a thick skull, jellyfishes are growing bigger and big sky theory is bad on water…

Start with skulls, during one of my nightwatches I lost my balance and fell. Luckily my head hit the side of the entrance to the cabin and gave me a second to grab something before falling all the way down to the floor. Got a small cut on my forehead but balsa-fiberglass sandwich against wood and sawdust seems to cancel out and I’ve seen no other problems than a sore forehead. Wouldn’t have been fun falling all the way down and landed on my face to think of it.

Usually people talk about big sky theory as a way to promote safety in the air and in space, shortly explained they say that there are so much space so it’s unlikely to fly into someone else because of that. Well, the Atlantic might be quite big too but let me introduce you the magic of GPS navigation and the big circle. What ships do is that they motor out from the European coast and then plot a big-circle towards their destination across the pond. What you end up with is a lot of boats going back and forth on the same place. If you plot a big circle from where we turned eastwards on our trip to the Azores you kind of end up with the same circle, so now we have at least a freighter every day passing just a couple of miles away. Yesterday we had to change our course because there was two big container ships meeting and we ended up between them. But that’s good, a nice training to get us shipshape before the English Channel.

Jellyfish then? The sailing ones are bigger now and they shimmer in the sunlight. We have a full moon as well and last night you got the same effect as they did in old movies when they shot night scenes midday with a blue filter. But hey less than a thousand nautical miles left to Horta!
Peters Sport here we come, shower here we come, Portuguese customs officers here we come (no sir we don’t have the boat full of rhum, sir) and a stunning view of Pico here we come. I wonder if there’ll be snow on Pico…

Well other than that we’re all good and still have high spirits! Our bow points towards Horta and we have water and diesel to take us there.

N 33 35
W 47 50