What a difference a day makes, as they say.
Today we have blue sky and almost no cloud. In the morning the wind is in the right direction and strong enough to give us 6 to 7 knots. Unfortunately this doesn’t last and by the middle of the afternoon, and as predicted, the wind starts to die down and within an hour we have gone from great wind to babies’ burps.
I spend nearly an hour playing cat and mouse with the wind, putting an engine on when the wind drops, only to switch it off ten minutes later when it picks up and we can sail properly for a short while. Eventually I give up when Samantha, having been set to steer to the wind, gives up and throws her toys out of the pram leaving me nearly 90 degrees off course because she has no wind to steer to. I put the engine back on and it stays on.
When Mike gets up in the late afternoon we put all the sail up to get as much help as possible for the engine. As I start to haul the rest of the main up, however, it makes a nasty grinding noise on the winch. I know something is wrong and manage to spot the problem before Mike does. Once again I have failed as first mate by putting the bloody topping lift on the winch instead of the main halyard. Why, why, why did he have to put those stupid bloody helpful labels on for me? Ever since they have gone on I have done it wrong. Hugely embarrassed and not helped by the fact that Mr Smartypants Captain is smirking and not even trying to hide it, I put the right one on.
My day is made worse, however, by reading our e-mails. Both mine and Mike’s drop into the same inbox – it makes it easier to download them using our terminally slow satellite phone. I spot the weather forecast for tomorrow and read it. Now with me, a little nautical information is a bad thing – I don’t normally bother reading these forecasts as they are unintelligible to me with their talk of frontal boundaries, low pressure disturbances and high pressure ridges but I understand the bit that says the sea will be “rougher when crossing into the shallower waters of the continental shelf (unavoidable)”. Oh great. How much ‘rougher’? I understand that it is ‘unavoidable’. We have to cross the continental shelf somewhere, and any stretch of water where the depth of the sea bed goes from 2500 metres to just over 200 metres is going to be turbulent to put it mildly. Now I have it to look forward to. Mike normally keeps these unpleasant facts under wraps until they are almost upon us as there is nothing to do but get on with it. I will just worry about it now. Presumably Mike thinks he may as well get all the bad news out of the way in one go, as he tells me there is no way we can now hope to make it to Portland before dark on Tuesday as we are going so slowly. Therefore, instead of hammering the engines and trying, we will stay at a slightly slower than normal speed and get in comfortably on Wednesday.
Still, with the calm sea that we have today, it means that I can make inroads into editing some of my photos of the World ARC rally and this has an added bonus of keeping me occupied. I have literally thousands of photographs and although I have culled them as I have gone along (ie deleted the ones which show me as I do not wish to look) there are still far too many. I can’t be too choosy though – if I delete anything where I do not match the fantasy of what I think I look like (that little picture in my head that somehow fails to live up to the thing that faces me in the mirror every morning) there will be none of me. Anyway, I spend a few happy hours doing this, and Mike practically has to prise me away from the keyboard and send me to bed.
It’s getting chillier by the day – we are now out of the Gulf Stream and the sea temperature has dropped once more. The boat is covered with a thick layer of salt that the heavy condensation fails to melt away and there is not enough heat to fully dry the cockpit. Even the sofas are starting to feel tacky with the constant salt and moisture laden air. Brrrr. Mike brings his slippers out for his night watch and keeps a pair of trousers nearby. Soon it’ll be the blanket and fleece jackets at this rate!
Position: 39 deg 34 min N, 68 deg 27 mins W
Distance so far: 1314 miles
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