Over the last three days, the winds have continued to be erratic in speed and direction, so the seas pick up, then smooth out, then pick up”¦ and so on. But overall, the ride is still pretty good, even at its roughest. Mike is bored stiff and suffering from internet withdraw, but the good news is that his injuries are healing nicely, probably aided by the fact that he isn’t moving around much. He is so lucky about the good seas. It is very hard to move around the boat in rough water, especially on the stairs. With the difficulty he has bending his knees thanks to his wounds, we don’t know how he could have physically done it if the water were rough.
Also over the last three days, moon has gone from a crescent to nothing. The small/no moon has been bad for visibility, but the flip side is that both the stars and bioluminescence are dazzling without the moonlight to usurp their glory.
On Sunday, we realized that, since we were making such great time, we were on track to arrive in Male at 2100 (9:00pm) on Thursday instead of noon Friday, as originally anticipated. Of course, you never want to come in while it is dark if at all possible, so we needed to slow down or speed up. We chose to speed up, clinging to the hope that we may possibly be able to check in if we make it Thursday afternoon. We picked up the RPMs to 1700, which gave us an average speed of over 7 knots. As the days have gone by, we have been slowly losing the favorable currents and have had to gradually increase the RPMs to maintain that speed. All day today (Wednesday), we have been running at 1900 RPM’s. At the moment, we are burning almost twice the fuel than we would have if we had slowed down to get in on Friday morning. But, at this point, we are committed. If we didn’t continue to increase the speed, we would arrive after sunset, do circles all night outside the bay, and then sit in the anchorage for 24 hours before being allowed to check in.
Monday was eventful. Early in the morning, we noticed our navigation light at the top of the mast went out, so now, in the dark, we look like a sailboat. It is not too easy to fix underway, since you have to climb the mast. We will wait until we are somewhere calm to fix it. We also passed Sri Lanka, so the amount of other boats around increased dramatically, with lots of cargo ships and a few fishing boats. We had a fishing boat come at us head on and pull up along side us, with the many crew members gesturing and yelling frantically. Eric thinks they said they wanted cigarettes, but we never slowed down to find out for sure, and they couldn’t keep up with us. We also crossed a shipping lane, but it isn’t even a fraction as busy as the ones around Singapore are, so we weren’t fazed by it.
Yesterday, the only noteworthy thing that happened was we got a hard rain, but even so, Komsos will still need to be scrubbed down when we get to Male.
Today was another eventful day. We saw not one, not two, but three pods of dolphins! The first pod was definitely the best. There were about 10 playing at the bow, and literally dozens more visible all the way around us that were actively body surfing on the waves. They stayed with us quite a while. The second pod was another 10 or so at the bow and a few more visible near by, but this group only stayed a few minutes. The last pod was just three or four at the bow, with no others visible, and they only stayed a minute. Much to our chagrin, the port (left) side stabilizer started squeaking today. Eric put some oil on it, which helped, but did not fix the problem. It sounds like a hungry cat desperately begging for food. Oh, and did we mention the stabilizer is next to the bed in the master bedroom? Right at Eric’s head?
And on to some blog questions:
Q: What kind of compressor are you running for the tank fills?
A: See Q 43 under FAQ’s https://kosmos.liveflux.net/blog/faq/
Q: Christi, are you having problems staying under water when you are diving because you are not dumping all the air out of your BC as you ascend??
A: Christi tries to deflate the BC, to the point where the BC is sometimes half full of water when she gets to the surface.
Q: Anchoring the dive boat within the calmer waters between the swift currents at Komodo National Park in the “SCUBA Diving in Komodo National Park” and “Diving and Swimming with the Manta Rays in Komodo National Park” posts sounds really tricky to control the swing.
A: We should have made this clear in that post”¦ there was crew member manning the wheel the entire time the boat was at the two dive sites.
Q: Do you ever roll out of bed? Are there bars on the bed? Or something to hold you in?
A: We do not have anything to hold us in bed, and so far we have not fallen out of bed. We have heard about other people on Nordhavns falling out of bed in rough seas. It can happen.