14 Jan: As Glen comes up for his shift at 3am he finds a hula hula girl in the cockpit. Ellie has opened a cheering up present from Oli and she now has glow-stick bracelets and headband on! Yes, that’s our Ellie, says Glen!
The wind has dropped so it’s out with the cutter again, back to twin headsails. Speed returns to a steady 7-8 knots.
It’s Sunday today, so captain says everyone can relax and take it easy all day. We’ll have a special “Aimbank” breakfast of coffee, croissants, grapefruit and sugar puffs followed by a long read of the Sunday newspapers… not! Actually, breakfast is same old fresh mango and home-brew yogurt. As predicted, Oana gives a face of disapproval as she tastes it, but then happily downs the lot!
For the first time – yes really the 1st time in a week – Glen takes the helm off of auto-pilot and manually steers. He declared it very light and easy, and boat movement is much less rolly. So Ellie and Oana agree that Glen must steer from now on, for the next 8 days! After an hour Glen decides to try switching to the old auto-helm ST7000. And amazingly it steers perfectly with the wheel hardly moving! And MUCH less rolling. Damn! Why didn’t we try that before? Glen vows to call Mr. Raymarine about this: how come a simple fluxgate compass can steer so much better downwind than the all-singing-all-dancing EVO400 with its fancy accelerometers? Pfffff! Spirits lift now that our world is more stable.
Glen and Ellie play with the sextant at midday sun while Oana cooks up a potatoes dish from her childhood days and it’s yummy along with chorizo. Later we play cards as the sun sets among puffy clouds, giving amazing rays and light on the water, while to the north there are very dark clouds – glad they are not coming our way.
In the early evening Ellie take star shots with the sextant and gets a position within 15 miles of actual – the best yet. Though how she could see the horizon in the dark is beyond me. The day was very warm and evening too. So it’s star gazing with Dr.Sansom on the aft deck. We spot a few shooting stars, the space station and a lot of discussion about meteorites and their origins. This aptly followed by a movie in the cockpit: Gravity. And so ends another day.