Today the Equator

An update on the round the world progress of Cheyenne

Steve Fossett and the crew of the maxi-catamaran Cheyenne have over the last 48 hours passed through the Doldrums without missing a beat and are this morning expecting to cross the Equator.

Despite being in an area of supposed light and fickle winds, the giant cat has still put in a run of 468 nautical miles at an average of 19.5 knots.

Brian Thompson reports from on board

Here we have entered the doldrums tonight, and they have been fairly gentle so far, we have got into one small rain shower where the boat speed dropped to 7 knots briefly, but the rest of the time we have been sailing at 20 knots.

Another good days run of 470 miles has seen our deficit to Orange shrink to just under 200 miles. Adrienne [Cahalan] expects this to expand a little tomorrow as at this point they were out of the doldrums, whilst we might be seeing showers and squalls down to 3S. After the doldrums we are looking at three days of good winds down the coast of South America, and then some potentially fluky winds near the south Atlantic high.

Yesterday morning in good flat water Justin [Slattery] went up the mast to check the gennaker halyard, change some bulbs on the masthead and do a regular rig check. We strapped him up with a head cam and DV recorder in a backpack and he got some great footage. On his way down he found that a batten car had lost its bottom pin and the receptacle for the batten was only hanging on by the top pin. This may have been broken for a while as it was on the third batten and too high to see from the deck. But even so we needed to fix it right away in case the batten came adrift and started to spear into the mast.

It was at the time of a watch change so the whole crew was on deck as we furled the big gennaker, turned upwind and dropped the main fully down on to the boom, between the lazy jacks. Then we turned downwind again and sailed with just the solent for the 20 minutes it took to fix the batten car and make sure all the other cars were fine. It was a grub screw that had loosened and allowed the pin to fall out, so we added Sikaflex to the heads of the other grub screws to back up the Loctite that was already on the threads. Whirly was able to make a quick inspection of the mainsail at the same time. Then we ground the mainsail all the way up, a 15 minute operation. Hot work..

Other than that there has been a quiet move to collect noxious items for the infamous crossing of the line ceremony. Mark is the only one not to have been initiated by Neptune and his entourage, and he is well aware of the impending events, he is holding up well, but must be getting a little nervous right now. I would be too by listening to some of the stories Justin in particular is coming up with. Being flogged with dead flying fish and then having to eat it raw, is one of the memorable ones..

Wildlife tally again a little slow today, although there were two new entries. I saw a tropic bird in the morning, an elegant white seabird with a long single tail. Mike saw what looked like a 6ft thresher shark, passing a few metres from the boat, and darting off in alarm when it sensed the boat. Other than that a couple of storm petrels and the ubiquitous flying fish...