Randall Reeves Says Hello to Latitude Nation

It’s time for your monthly Randall Reeves-ing. Nation, last night, the solo-sailor extraordinaire sent you a message:

Greetings from 47°S and 122°W. That position is significant; it’s the same longitude as San Francisco, although the latitude is some 5,000 miles further south. I’d wave from the masthead, but I think such might still be below the horizon.

Day 152 since our San Francisco departure. In those five months, we’ve completed 20,855 miles of the Figure 8 Voyage and have just 2,117 miles to a Cape Horn return (our first rounding, as you will recall, was on November 29 of last year). We’ve now crossed well over 300 degrees of longitude of the 360 degrees needed to complete the Southern Ocean circle and will soon seek to close this *first* loop of the Figure 8. The long slog up the Atlantic is next.

All well aboard. Big issues in the Pacific thus far have been on-again-off-again wind. A blasting gale will be followed by calm, even down here. The whole purpose of rounding at such a high latitude (compare the Golden Globe Racers at 39°S to 42°S) is to stay in the stronger winds. But I think we’ve had more calms in the last month than the entirety of the voyage before New Zealand. So, the Pacific leg has, thus far, been slower than the Atlantic and Indian.

All the food lockers are beginning to show signs of use. I ran out of cookies long ago, and I’m close to running out of chocolate bars, the heavy, dark, bitter-sweet kind.

I’m down to my last 30 cans of beer, too. I started with only 185 cans for a 200+ day voyage. Just couldn’t cram any more aboard than that. I shudder at the thought of the beer-less day to come. Though there is whiskey and some red wine, so all is not lost.

Hope things are well up north.

Latitude Nation — Reeves also posted this video on his blog: