At midnight, the end of my first watch, Mike decides that there is sufficient wind for us to get the main back up. It takes a while and as usual one of the sail batons gets caught up in the lazy jacks which is harder to spot when it’s dark. There is a sudden ‘twang’ as the sail suddenly shoots up so that’s probably a broken lazy jack. As I sit there holding onto the ropes, it starts to drizzle, only a bit, not enough to actually do any good in the boat washing stakes, but enough to make me feel damp.
When I come up for my second watch, there is just enough wind for us to sail and Mike has cut the engine. The moon, which was at the stern of the boat on my first watch, is now ahead of me and falling. I stand at the stern of the boat just looking out over the silvery sea and wonder about all the things swimming around us which I can’t see. Maybe it’s better I can’t!
I go back to bed after my second watch and after managing to sleep for a few hours, lazy thing that I am, I lounge around on my bed with the fan on, only getting up after midday when I hear Sean on Wild Tigris calling on the SSB. Mike in the meantime has been busy. He has fixed the lazy jack line and has spent a couple of hours down his black hole fixing a leaking hose from the starboard engine. Whoever fixed it last time put a length in that was too long and therefore got a kink in it which has spent some time rubbing against a vibrating part of the engine – or something. Anyway, his temporary fix seems to be working.
Once up, I make lunch and while Mike sleeps in the afternoon, I sit and watch the sea go by – very, very slowly. During the morning the wind dropped to almost nothing and we now have no sails out as there is less than 5 knots of wind, sometimes less than 2. The sea is flat calm and we are motoring. I look around at absolutely nothing. I have seen no other traffic on the sea for two days now, and the total wildlife we see today is two dead fish on the trampolines, two sea snakes and a whole load of small jellyfish floating by. Oh, and the strange red algae is back, but this time it looks even more like the remains of some boat’s holding tanks! Nice!
In the late afternoon, I am standing in the outside companionway near the cockpit when Mike shouts to watch out. A bird is coming straight at me with his legs out ready to land. I duck and it flaps off, circling the boat and landing on the guard rail about 10 feet in front of me. It almost falls off and literally grabs the rail by hooking its neck over it as it tumbles backwards, flapping wildly. It is obviously exhausted and looking for a place to rest. As I had been standing still for so long, my head must have looked like a nice, comfy perch.
Photo: Flapping and preening
For the next three hours he sits there preening himself, at first flapping all the time – he is so tired he can’t balance properly – then as he becomes more rested, his flapping stops, and the preening continues less frantically.
We have done so much motoring that we need to put some diesel in the tank from the jerry cans. Actually, I’m not sure that we do but Mike seems eager to use his new gadget – a special siphon tube with a ball bearing (actually it’s a marble) in the end. It’s called a jiggle siphon and you shove one end in the jerry can and the other in the tank and jiggle the jerry can end around. The marble allows the diesel in as you push down and when enough diesel is in, the normal siphoning effect takes over and hey presto it all flows from can to tank. No it doesn’t. In reality, the bloody marble falls out into the jerry can and we have to manually fill the tank and then retrieve the marble – three times! After that, it’s a massive clean up to get all the diesel off the cockpit surfaces, along with the charcoal which has come out of a broken bag that the jerry cans were sitting on and is now all over the floor. It was in need of a wash anyway.
Our little feathered stowaway doesn’t even shift when the wind starts to pick up in the evening and Mike puts the genoa back out. At last we are able to sail again and turn off the bloody engines.
Photo: Still preening but less flapping
Another beautiful sunset is followed by a beautiful display of clouds. I fiddle with the camera settings. One day I must try to understand what some of the more complex ones actually do and the results might be even better.
Photos: Guess what?
At the sun dips over the horizon, for the first time ever, I see the green ‘flash’.
Our position is: 10 deg 53 min S, 134 deg 40 min E
Distance so far: 11750 nautical miles
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