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Murphy - Half way there - Day 9



Corrigendum

Full marks to anyone who spotted the error in the last log – even the captain's whiskers don't grow that slowly – it should have said 0.00025 inches per nautical mile sailed (not 1,000 miles, as stated). For those who didn't notice – sit up and fold your arms and attend!

Nightly imaginings

You wouldn't expect the captain to be very imaginative – he is a chartered accountant after all – but sometimes even accountants can surprise you. Boats on passage make a lot of noise: the rush, slap, splash, gargle, gurgle, bubble, surge and occasional roar of the water against the hull; the sounds of the rigging and the gear: squeak, eek*, click, clang, bang, ding, dong; the occasional flutter or thwack of the sails, that lovely sound like a drum-roll on timpani; and those less well-defined noises: thud, thump, clunk, judder, boom, thwack, clonk from whatever – altogether a veritable thesaurus of sound. From his berth in the forepeak, just behind the bow that is cutting through the waves, all these sounds are amplified and channelled into the captain's brain in the small hours of the night. Real sounds connect with ancient fears and imaginings to produce logical and coherent fantasies of disaster; the thuds and the booms are the worst – they become the breaking of the genoa pole, or worse still the breaking free of the 600 kilograms of lead ballast in the anchor locker (don't ask), bursting through the deck or the hull, followed by footsteps on deck(the thumps) as the watch rushes to assess the damage and those mechanical noises are their fruitless attempts at repair. The captain is torn between rushing to confront this imaginary disaster and burying his head in his bunk – prayer has been a third option which has definitely helped.

There is no better feeling, though, than rising to meet the scene of devastation to find Jeff saying all is well, the sun shining and a bowl of muesli awaiting – his wife is right: it's all about the food with him.

The passage

Our route until yesterday was pretty straight forward, based on the well-known fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. We have now decided to do some proper weather routing as we could see that at some point on our straight line course there was no weather – or at least no wind. So we have diverted a little further south, in the hope of missing most of the calm, which is predicted in the next two to three days. Mutinous mutterings have been heard amongst the crew, saying “what's so wrong with a calm?”.

Half way there

Sometime today we will achieve the halfway mark (could be an extra special happy hour), and the speculation is mounting as to whether Jeff really will mark the occasion by taking a dip in the Atlantic Ocean. He insists that he will, but the rest of the crew are definitely a bit iffy about it – the sea temperature is remarkably warm, but they worry about what lies beneath. Seems pretty rational to me.

Andrew, Lucinda, Jake and Jeff

Noon, Wednesday 5th December

Footnote: * It turns out the eek noise may have been Lucinda's reaction to another flying fish landing.




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