12 Jan: Yo land lubbers! Day 6 on the good ship Cloudy Bay and all is well. Good spirits prevail, no one thrown overboard and no sign of scurvy… yet! Infact not much sign of the fridges volume decreasing even. This morning the mangos were finally ripe for breakfast – yummy, getting us ready for all that Caribbean tropical fruit.
After breakfast the usual routine of messing around with the sails. Last night the lazy genoa sheet bowline came undone and the line to the boom-pole chaffed again. So we changed from twin headsails to main and poled genoa. But then found that genoa alone was the most comfortable. The main seems to give the autohelm a hard time, so we put it away for now.
Next routine is uploading the blog, downloading the forecast, running the generator to charge batteries, make a bit of water and heat the water to encourage the girls to shower 🙂 Then the debate what is for lunch while we bask in the sun, which seems to get a bit warmer each day.
It’s a tough life out here in mid Atlantic as we cross the 6000m depth contour and pass over several undersea mountains… is a mountain under the sea called a mountain? I guess seamount is the correct term, and some rise 4000m off the abyssal plain. Odd to think what lies there under us.
Around midday Glen takes his first sun sight with sextant without blinding himself. But the calculations put us off a bit. Though… what’s plus or minus a 100 miles out here?! Talking of which, no sign of any ship for 3 days now.
In the evening, just when the rolling seems to be at a crescendo, Ellie decides to make spaghetti bolognese! Just getting the ingredients out of the various cupboards is a task to behold! It seems that item you want is elusive and the rest of the items are desperate to escape the moment any cupboard door is opened. Anyway, she manages a tasty dish and surprisingly not much splatter around the galley! And so we roll our way into day 7 with a few rain showers during the night.