[Dar Es Salaam - Phuket] Day 29 -- Watches

On day twentynine the captain established regular watches. Each of us, except for the cook, would go on watch for two hours followed by four hours of rest. By that, everyone had his fixed times during the day. My turns were from midnight until two, from six to eight in the morning, noon to two in the afternoon and six to eight at night again. Four watches a day made roughly about 20 more watches before arriving at our final destination, Phuket. We were counting the days, the hours, the remaining miles, the remaining watches, everything that would bring us closer to our goal in countable intervals.

The watches organized the day well and made the hours countable much better, even though it wasn't for making time go any faster. With the sea calming down and the autopilot not failing rather infrequently, a watch would last much longer now than in the days of manual steering, when an hour would fly past with a couple of rudder turns. The sea was still rough, but calmed down significantly during the day and the coming night. During the day we had no more rain and I started to dry the soaked cushions by hanging them in any place high enough to keep them upright. By night, a short rain squall had extinguished my efforts by soaking them again. I'd have to start over if we were ever to sit on a dry cushion again.

captains log:
0200 rainfall, drop Mizzen
sea very rough
hand-steering most the time, Einstein no go, sea very rough
1200 N3°20 E85°42
1600 Typhoon at N12° E88° (200SW off)
set a bit of Genoa, strong southerly current