Jeanne tames the world's wildest ocean

How's our 76-year-old lady solo mariner, Jeanne Socrates, doing down there in the vast Southern Ocean? Remarkably well!

She has covered 18,148 nautical miles on her 208th day yesterday. She has most likely sailed very much further because Jeanne very modestly measures daily distances between fixes. That won't include distances sailed in tacks, of course.

Jeanne has signalled back to we landlubbers:

'7am: Dark grey mass of cloud ahead with deep orange line of light below.

'Bright silver crescent moon high up. Seas well down.'

Breakfast

She reports some very slow progress. 'Struggling to make way downwind in very light wind.

'1030am: Having breakfast after a long radio sched.

'Lovely to chat to so many contacts in Australia - from Perth and Albany in West Australia to Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, and up to near Brisbane.'

The Australian coast, 120 miles away, appeared on her electronics on the yacht. 'It's the first land I've seen on the screen since the Falklands, soon after Cape Horn.

'Very cloudy sky, but no rain so far. Wind still light. So soup and then some pancakes. I needed hot food to warm up.

'Suddenly got a lot rougher as wind increased over the afternoon, but the wind has been less than I was hoping for overnight.

'The pancakes were excellent though!' Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventuring book, Sailing to Purgatory, at http://sailingtopurgatory.com/index.php/feeds/385-jeanne-tames-the-world-s-wildest-ocean