Day 10: Equator crossing!

We had a visitor today - 1 lone dolphin. This is unusual as most dolphins travel in numbers in a pod.

We also had a wakeup call today. You see, at night, we get organized. We secure stuff on deck and maybe reduce sails a bit, we get out the timer for checks throughout the night and designate each other to watch times. Then during the day, we both are up and about, sometimes taking catch-up naps and the watch routine somehow didn't bear the same degree of vigilance. Jordan had put his head down on my lap for a power nap, but before drifting off (and usually that is about instantly), he thought he better go up and do a check as neither of us had probably done it for awhile. Well as he went up the companionway, I heard a loud "holy shit". I jumped up and all I saw was a wall of steel passing right beside us. We had just sailed right across the path of this large behemoth. Jordan said he almost crapped his shorts.

Shaken, we immediately called a safety meeting and implemented the rule of a continued vigilant watch routine throughout all 24 hours of the day.

We watched that freighter travel away and determined that it would take only 20 to 25 minutes before it would be out of noticeable sight.

Then not much later that day, with the new schedule working, Jordan again went up to do his 15-minute check and sure enough just up ahead was another freighter on a converging course. We mustered stations and tacked to avoid at best guess a direct hit. We re-tacked and passed behind.

Today is equator day! We finally reached and crossed the equator at 14:09 today - we're in the Southern Hemisphere, officially! This is a first for Sea Turtle (but Jordan & I did cross the equator last year as crew on another boat).

ALMOST at the equator

Snapped the camera 1 second too soon!! We celebrated this momentous occasion with a bottle of chilled Hungarian bubbly from good friends Lou & Angie of Victoria. They gave us this bottle 2 years ago and we saved it for this special day.

The occasion also called for getting dressed up, as sailors traditionally do something different, outrageous, and/or memorable (i.e. shave their heads, put on a costume, etc.) As Jordan recently had to shave his head when struck by a fan blade, and I most definitely did not want to shave mine, we decided to get fancy.

Captain Winston O'Vanely (Windvane for short)

and 1st Mate Castaway Coco

We posted a funny video on YouTube that we hope you will enjoy. You can click on Other Links, Equator party (yikes!) at the right of our blog, or simply click on the link below:

https://youtu.be/Zhf2TQuVUP0

We also gave the traditional toast and taste to Neptune to stay in his good grace. Ours went as follows:

To Nautical Neptune, here is our ocean offering for positive passages, merry moments, and sustained safety on our various voyages.

Then glug, glug, glug overboard. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun and will remember this day for a long time to come.

Today's position around midnight: S00°07'60" W080°29'45" (notice S00° - no longer N__°)