I actually manage to go to sleep after my 12 to 4 am watch but unlike a normal person, I wake a few hours later, so still don’t manage to get my full quota.
We crossed another time zone yesterday and so are now eight hours behind UK time. Getting the right time can be difficult and depends where you look to find it. The weather reader time displays the local time, the chartplotter/radar displays Galapagos time (position reporting etc is always done by the time of the port you have just left) and our computers display UK time. For someone who rarely knows what day of the week it is anymore, this can be very confusing.
As the sea is much calmer today both Mike and I do the death patrol, and thirty three little bodies go back into the sea, including three that I find in the cockpit itself. How I managed not to step on one of these during the night is incredible. I even find one tucked down behind one of the cockpit cushions by following its trail of discarded scales. Gross. At least we are only finding flying fish now, no squid any more which is much better.
While Mike takes a well earned rest in the afternoon I decide to bake a cake. Mike has been whining for days now that he has no treats in the cupboard for his night watches – sweets, chocolate, crisps, that sort of thing – so I think a cake might do the trick. Looking through my ‘Ship to Shore’ recipe book (ghastly thing which is full of nasty short cut recipes for the galley slaves of this world) I find a recipe for gingerbread which I can adapt, but what the hell is the Brer Rabbit Molasses it asks for? I swap strange Ecuadorian salted butter for the stated shortening, fresh ginger for the powdered stuff, ignore the inclusion for cloves and use solid raw cane sugar mixed with hot water for the molasses so it ends up bearing little resemblance to the original recipe which normally suits me just fine. On top of that I cannot bear to use our ‘warm or burn to a cinder’ oven to bake it so I split the mixture (which is delicious raw by the way) and put half in the bread maker and set it to bake only. As the cycle only lasts ten minutes, I put it on three times. And the result? Delicious ginger cake. Really. We’ll cook the other half tomorrow.
Late in the afternoon we get another bite on the fishing line, and again it is something very big and again we end up losing the bloody line and the lure. I don’t know why Mike persists in this. The Pacific obviously only grows small flying fish or monsters of the deep.
I have two watches tonight, and in my exhausted state, I don’t know how I am going to get through them. Mike offers to do two instead of one but that’s not fair so I turn him down. Just before I am due to finish my first one, I get a call from Jan on Ronja asking me if I can see any more of the flashing yellow buoys that I have just passed. What flashing yellow buoy? Am I so tired that I can miss something like this? I rush out and look all around me but still can’t see anything. Although I don’t like to do it I wake Mike because now I am really worried, but he can’t see it either. The upside of this is that it is now not worth him going back to bed so I get to go off watch ten minutes early.
Our position is: 08 deg 26 min S, 124 deg 54 min W
Distance so far: 4773 nautical miles
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