Star date, 28th October, 2014, Ships Log

These are the stories of the voyage of the JST Lord Nelson. To boldly, courageously and just plain fool hardily to go where everyone has been before!

On the noon to four watch today are; Luis, Alex, Ellie, Jordan, Billy “the Kid”, Phil and Crispian. Big Bill, our other team member, is away from watch duties and has temporarily taken an allegiance with Cookie, who currently has him promoted to chief pot washer.

We are currently steaming at 5.7 knots, 8 miles off the coast of Portugal and land is very visible to our port side. The midnight to four am watch this morning saw quite a lot rougher weather than we had experienced in Biscay,  around force four to five which was enough to conjure the image of the opening sequence to the Onedin Line – for those of you who are old enough to remember!

Earlier today we were briefly escorted by a couple of dolphins, who quickly became very camera shy when the photo shoot was requested. Perhaps another time………..?

At lunch time the ship’s morale is high, Cookie has stuffed us all full of his homemade pizza and the promise of sampling free port in the port houses in Porto within the next 24 hours has got everyone buzzing. As we near civilisation we are starting to notice the odd fishing boat and fishing buoy and as I’m writing this we are heading towards an ocean data survey buoy. The plan is to dock at Porto around 8pm tonight but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s entry to find out how that went. “Make it so number one”…. And so until tomorrow….