The wind has been unpredictable, ranging from 2 to 32 knots and shifting around during the day and it's been sitting at 30 most of the night. The weather has been a mix of sunshine and rain, making for an interesting 24hrs. Despite being only 16 degrees south of the equator, it's still not as warm as I expected. At one point, a ship came within half a mile of us. Before AIS, a ship heading towards us would have meant a lot of drama. We would have to estimate its course with binoculars , and to constantly check the bearings and decide if we should change course to avoid a collision. Now, we have all that information displayed on the chart plotter from 20 nautical miles away. Half a mile might not seem like much, but at sea it's considered a very close encounter. Before we had chart plotters "back in the day" we occasionally had to navigate with charts which were photocopies of photocopies and were so degraded that they had holes in them. We had no idea what was ...