Hi Everyone,
Today was the day that we finally set sail, experienced ocean waves for the first time and spent much of the day in pleasant recreation.
We managed to set sail as planned around 1pm, taking a pilot onboard to navigate us through the narrow spaces as we left Montevideo and sailed for the open oceans. We aim to reach South Georgia and our first research point on the 28th in ~6 days. Everyone was in good spirits and all together, especially as the waves were almost nonexistent initially and we could make good progress.
The waves gradually increased to about 1m in height by the end of the day, and this led to some people feeling the ill effects of seasickness. Thankfully we had a good supply of medication and only light work being required. Unfortunately, this does not bode particularly well for our future sailing, as waves in the Southern Ocean frequently reach >6m and the forecast waves on our route reach about 4m. If you would like to have a look at the wave forecasts (and other forecasts) on our route I can highly recommend this link: https://www.windy.com/
One of the reasons for the lack of work was that as we were still within the EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) of Uruguay we were not able to take measurements. This has a great positive impact in allowing us to socialise together over some games of darts, backgammon and table football. Many of these games were made much more entertaining by the random motion of the ship, meaning some of the goals in the table football were more by random motion than through the skill of the players!
22/12/22
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