Trip Summary & We can get eMail

(Victoria posting ... I received this email from Spencer today)

Update: 6/17/09 Wednesday 1:35 am
Position:
37 degrees 47 minutes North
23 degrees 01 minute West
664 miles west of the Strait of Gibraltar

Hello:
We finally have an email link here on Irishman!!!!!!!!!!!!
IRISHMAN1@skyfile.com ("spencer" in the subject line)

Quick Review:
Left St. Martin on 6/2/09 (Tuesday). We had a few days of very good sailing weather. As we got further north the wind started to die. They call this area out in the Atlantic the "Horse Lattitudes". Not sure why, but the first person to find out and email me back wins a
T-shirt!!!!!!!! It was dead calm out here for a few days. Not even a ripple on the water on June 6th. We caught 3 Tuna and 1 Mahi Mahi that were prepared wonderfully by Stefano our chef. The freshest tuna sushi every! 

There are six of us on board so we have a 2 hour watch schedule. Each person is on watch for two hours and then on Standby for another 2 hours in case the watch person needs any assistance. Of course everybody is up and ready in case more help is needed. We have an autopilot so we don't have to self steer the boat. It's pretty easy.  It's all computerized so we just keep an eye on the wind, when there is wind, and adjust sails when needed. Other than that we monitor all the gauges. We have a generator running and usually the main engine to help keep our speed up when the wind isn't strong enough. 

Usually the biggest choice to make during watch is which ipod to plug into the dock and what songs to listen to. We have a big screen TV down below and tons of movies. Everyone of course has tons of reading material as well. I have brought with me all my home movies from the past 10 years.  I am in the process of importing them all into my computer and editing them down. It's been great watching them as I import them. 

So back to day to day life on board.... I have the 12 noon to 2 pm watch, then standby watch from 2pm to 4pm. Then I'm back on at 12 midnight to 2am and standby from 2am to 4am. I've usually been getting 3 to 4 hours of sleep after dinner before my midnight watch and then sleeping from 4am till 8:30am. Everybody falls into their routine and it has worked well with no conflicts. We saw the lights of the Azores around midnight on Saturday June 13, 2009. We finally got anchored around 4am local time.

We had a great but short visit in the Azores. We were in the town of Horta on the island of Faial. It's a Portuguese island but most people speak English. None of us slept on Saturday night as we were approaching the island. We anchored out Saturday morning and waited to get on the fuel dock which didn't happen untill about 1:30 in the afternoon. We got the boat cleaned up, had a few drinks and went out to dinner. Everybody got some much needed sleep. Sunday Morning I got up and ran 5 miles. It was a great way to explore a new place. We arranged to rent a couple of cars and went on an island tour mid-day. It was great. I hope to post some video and pictures when we get to Palma which should be on Monday.

Right now we have little to no wind so we are motoring east at around 9.5 knots. In case you didn't know a knot is about 1.2 miles per hour. So 9.5 knots is about 11.4 miles per hour. We saw a very large school of dolphins yesterday. There must of been over a hunderd of then swimming and playing along the boat. Hopefully we got some good pictures.

Well that's it for now on Irishman.

Here's our email address:

IRISHMAN1@skyfile.com

Just put "Spencer" in the subject line and I should get it. No pictures
or attachments please.

I'll hopefully be able to check my regular email
(spencer@sailhappyhour.com) sometime around Monday...

Please forward this to anybody that you think might be interested.

Regards,

Spencer