The Antimeridian

I love Greenwich, every time we go back to the old country we visit Greenwich, the Observatory, the story of Longitude, the Harrison clocks. The sheer amount of seafaring history all in one place is a wonderful thing to behold.
Standing astride the Greenwich Meridian I had never really put any thought into what goes on on the other side of the planet at 180 degrees.
Putting our waypoints in the chart plotter for our trip north the other day we realised we would be sailing across and back over the Antimeridian going from 179 degrees some minutes East to 179 degrees some minutes West and back again.

OOOh exciting - technically we will be crossing over the date line - or where the date line should be  -I guess it got moved to allow countries to share the same day as its actually a bit over to the East of where we will be sailing.

Hurry up and go

This is the chap that we are waiting for - once he's out of the way we can shoot northwards like a pinball between two spinning weather systems towards the sun and the tropics.

Ready and Waiting

Waiting for the weather - I mean it's OK if you're out there and you get hit with 40kn winds plus and big seas, you'd hope that you and the boat would be able to cope OK. In reality it's going to happen at some stage but to sail off out into it knowing it's forecast, well, that's plain dumb. Also it would be handy if the wind was coming from the right direction - as soon as that baby is out of the way we should be good to go.
So in the meantime we have quit our jobs (till the summer), filled Wild Sweet with food, water, fuel, books, rum and clothes. We are hanging out waiting for the weather window that will see us at least until Minerva Reef, an atoll in the middle of the ocean which many yachties use as a stopover between here and the Islands.
I intend to be writing this blog and uploading it where we can get internet as we will not be online while at sea. Sharing the news to facebook as well. We will still be getting our emails at paynepirates@yahoo.com when we can access internet either through shore wifi or data on local SIM cards.