Delivery day 13

As today is a special day on board, I decided that I would write the blog and give the birthday boy a rest.

I went on watch around 9 o'clock last night to a rather dark evening at sea. There was almost no wind so we were motor sailing under the Milky Way in large swells. A short while later the moon rose on our bow. The moon is now 1/2 full but still very bright. A meteor came streaming through the earth's atmosphere and lit everything up for a brief moment, only to notice that we had company sitting on our bottom spreader. As I veered up and down the waves the poor bird kept loosing her balance and extended her wings to help her stay on the spreader. By the shape of the wings I thought that the bird might be a tern. So I called Nick, the 'bird expert', to get a better opinion. At first he also thought it was a tern. He then go a big spot light and discovered that it was a Brown Noddy Bird. There are 3 different types of Noddy birds with the brown Noddy birds breeding on Ascension Island. Noddy birds don't migrate or normally travel far and this one just looked exhausted. Nick and I hoisted the jib and continued to sail. This did not bother the Noddy Bird at all. She flew off and came and sat on the radar dome for over 5 hours. Nick said that he has seen Noddy birds sit on boats before so this was quite normal.

By mid-morning we had about 14 knots of wind and were beam reaching. The sun was out and this was a great time to celebrate Nick's Birthday with a slice of fruit cake and a cup of tea.

Although we are some 180 miles north east of Tristan da Cunha now, we have started to see lots of kelp floating in the water. We are now sailing between the loose floating kelp in the sunshine. We are sailing a bit deeper on a course of 113 true. We saw a fully loaded container ship that passed to starboard of us so we must still be near the great circle route.