There are lots of things they don't teach you when you take your captain's license or equivalent. Working with a crew a bit of management psychology would be useful, this you have to pick up as you go along or take from your career in the real world. One thing I have learned is that you have to wake up well. In theory this is no problem, you spring lightly out of bed reaching simultaneously for wet weather gear, head-torch and lifejacket (or in one very obviously urgent case on the last trip absolutely nothing and appear at the helm mother naked) and ask what you can help the crewmember on watch with. This could be an unidentified radar contact coming towards you, a change in wind speed or direction a malfunction of equipment or pretty much anything else. Standing orders are to wake the captain for certain specific things or in any case where you are not sure what to do. I've never had a problem with this the first or second time it happens but just occasionally you get woken every single time that you fall fast asleep and the fifth time there is a strong tendency to yell "What the **** is it now!". If you do this then no one is going to wake you up until they are in real trouble and it's too late to do anything. Last night I had to really concentrate to wake up and deal with each situation as it came and not get grumpy (My dwarf name). We had ships, possible ships, squalls, wind up, wind down, wind moved, plotter rebooting every five minutes and as it got light Whales. Although I tried my best to be 'captain perfect' clearly by 3 the cracks were showing and Saint Louise, bless her didn't wake me up for my 3-6 watch until I woke up myself at 3:45. Having had 75 minutes of uninterrupted sleep was enough to get back to proper and cheerful function.
The whales were several hundred yards away, brown and with a vertical narrow spout. It wasn't easy to tell their size but my book says the spout is a Fin whale. These are really big and we look forward to seeing some closer. We see some form of marine mammal pretty much every day now and the cry of "dolphins" or "turtle" is not necessarily followed by everyone rushing to the bow, although most times we do and for whales I always will.
I gave a cloud class yesterday as we had an amazing sky with eight or more cloud types. As a kid I thought clouds were: fluffy, layered, wispy, rainy and mixtures of the above. Twenty years of Gliding, flying and now sailing education has taught me this was essentially correct but people are much more impressed if you know the names and what they foretell. Right now we can see stratus clouds above us which foretell rain (the clue being that just beyond them it's absolutely hissing down in dark grey sheets). So we are about to get a soaking.
A fantastic lunch from Jim, orange and apple pancakes with crispy bacon. Also, a very strange lunch time conversation about chocolate. Apparently, there is a new product in Canada about which people are raving, a chocolate and bacon bar!
93 miles to Horta, so Tuesday breakfast on land.
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