Ben Edwards 26 July-27 July on watch, nightime, Barents Sea
For any of you who are watching us on the AIS I wish to reassure you that we have not gone insane, or least not by that much…. Yes, we are going round in circles, no this isn’t very constructive to swift progress but there is madness to our method, or something. South of us is wind, strong wind, in fact, wind strong enough that we don’t want to be there. As such we want to stay in the north. There is still wind in the north, wind that we are using, but not in the right direction for us to plow on ahead, and anyway, the Laptev sea is still covered with ice. As such we just want to hang around in the north and wait for the ice to shift or melt in our favour, and because of the wind we can do that under sail.
So we’re just zigzagging about off the Northern tip of Novaya Zemlya and it’s sunny and warm and a couple of hours ago a whale turned up offering us free drinks and free tickets to an underwater adaptation of the Lion King. In case you hadn’t noticed, that was a lie. It is cold and felt colder than it is because of the wind. The wind keeps coming round so we have to tack the sails and while it isn’t raining we still are cold enough to switch with the other crew member on your watch every half hour. We haven’t got the engine on so it’s not much warmer inside than it is out. The water temperature is under five degrees, you don’t want to fall in.
I’m on watch and about to hand over to our tame Irishwoman, Barara, so on that note, thank you very much for reading and goodnight