Mike Perham keeps good look out
After the lonely vastness of the Pacific, sailing schoolboy Mike Perham, 17, is now surrounded by shipping in the busy North Atlantic as he makes his final run for home and the record for being the youngest , solo circumnavigator.
His latest blog reveals:’I’m seeing a lot of the shipping going across the Atlantic to Europe on my AIS these days and today I saw around a dozen or so come within 40miles (the range of my AIS).
‘I’m chuffed to report that I ticked another box today with the 2500nm to go mark. I’m always setting myself short-term targets to aim for and having lot of ‘boxes’ to tick mentally really keeps me going. The time seems to pass a lot easier as I feel like I’m progressing nicely.
‘It’s been a little slower today with only around 13knots of wind but this helped make for a day of graceful sailing and I’ve really enjoyed it. This evening I had another of those moments. I was sitting on my bright orange coach roof, the sun had already set and I was just mesmerised by all the incredibly misty colours the sun had left behind. I had a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar in hand (the Crunchie version too!) and we were just ghosting along at 8knots or so. I love listening to the sound we make passing through the water – Totallymoney.com really was just so graceful.
‘The weather for the next few days looks a little interesting with a small low pressure passing over us with possibly a second to follow, so we’ll see what happens with that, as I’m not yet sure how much they’re going to deepen.’