Today: Making a Run for It; Being on Top of Cloud Nine;
When Visitors are like fish; Diesel for Sail; Hold the date;
Happy Sunday!
We hope you have had a wonderful day with opportunity to
kick back, read the newspapers, read the BLOG OF YOUR FAVORITE SAILBOAT
(subtle enough hint?), mess around with the kids or friends and get a chance to
recharge the batteries for the week ahead. We are happy to report that we, in
fact, did none of the above. We were already “kicked back”, we have no
newspapers, we write the blog of our favorite sailboat, the kids are a few
thousand miles away and our batteries are already topped up so no need to
recharge!
To set the scene, we have just finished dinner, Bill has
gone to do a power nap as he is on the 22:00 – 01:00 watch, Mike is finishing
cleaning dishes, (he is on the 04:00 – 07:00) Jane has set up all our
equipment for the night (she is on the 01:00 to 04:00- the hardest one to
do) and I am on watch from 19:00 to 22:00. So, picture if you can, a dashing,
tanned, swarthy, ocean hardened sailor –+well, he is not here—you are stuck with
me. I am sitting at the helm with the lap top, well actually on my lap—now
that’s a first. Anyone else own a lap top but never actually used it on their
lap? Directly ahead of us is the sun making its final curtain call behind the
scattered clouds that are ringing the boat right now. The moon hasn’t come to
the party just yet. The temperature is 27 C and the humidity is a pleasant 70%
with the winds running a steady 16 knots. It is an understatement to say that
there are a lot worse places to be right now.
In our last blog, you may recall that Sundays are very
important because we observe a Clare family tradition of having bacon and eggs
with toast prepared by the head of the household himself, Mike. Not only do we
get the basics but he tailor cooks all of the eggs to each person’s
specifications. We thought that your day would be incomplete if you were not
informed of our personal preferences, for those occasions when we drop by for
breakfast and you know what to serve: Jane likes hers flipped over and the yolk
cooked; Bill likes his sunny side up (yolk soft); the captain likes his flipped
over but the yolk soft and Mike is a fan of poached but as we don’t have poached
eggs here (too much effort) he has his sunny side up as well. Do you feel that
somehow that this information filled a void in your life? If so, you really
should get out more often.
We have had a very chilled day and are looking forward to
an equally uneventful night. For those of you actually paying attention to the
sailing bit of this blog, you must be anxious to find out... wait for it.. if
Izzy is still out to play or if she had to go home last night? We are very
pleased to say that she did not have to get put away last night and is still out
front of Libeccio, leading us on. This also means that the winds have been of a
favourable direction so that we could achieve our track while at the same time
having her flying.
We don’t want to worry you dear reader, but, behind all of
this rather calm exterior, we are getting a little nervous about some developing
weather that we would rather miss. To quote today’s forecast:
Satellite imagery shows a mass of cloud from 48W to 58W extending from the
low at 25N 60W . This is giving heavy squalls, thunder, and longer periods of
rain mainly N of 15N with more isolated squalls to the south. There is
widespread lightening in this area. YIKES! For the technical types the
numbers with letters refer to the Latitude and Longitude of the weather system.
What make this all very “interesting” for us is that we are currently in the not
so fun region and if we continue to be in this area, you guessed it, we are not
going to have as much fun as we did today. So, what are our choices- no, its a
bit too early to call in the Navy. We really just have the choice of trying to
get out of the way as quickly as we can and that is what we are doing. The other
constraint is that we actually do have to get to St Lucia within the next 10
days and so can not head directly south. We have therefore set a course that
will deliver us out of the not so much fun area in just over two days—which
would be just before it is supposed to arrive. Stay tuned.
Lets move away from such negative things and get back to
today —it could be said that we were on Cloud Nine because it was such a nice
day. Did you know where the Cloud Nine saying came from? Well, in an attempt to
raise the overall awareness of all things to do with meteorology, we can report
that, in tonight’s lecture on clouds, professor Jane ran us through the
history of the classification system. Apparently, the cumulus nimbus, which is
considered the tallest cloud, was number 9 in the original categorisation. Even
though a subsequent update to the classification system changed the number to
10, it was subsequently returned to number 9 when the categorisation system was
updated. Apparently, all sorts of weathermen and women took to the street in
protest and lyricists complained that they would have to change the words to
their songs. The power of the people!
When are visitors like fish? When they are, in fact, a
fish- in this case a flying fish. We had such a visitor sometime last night. He,
er it, arrived unannounced at the front door and as a result we were not aware
that it had arrived and so did not invite the visitor in. Sadly, the fish had to
be assisted overboard this morning as it was resting (permanently) and no one
fancied kippers with their bacon and eggs. We are fortunate that our helm is
about 2 meters above the water as apparently these keen little fliers often will
surprise skippers of boats with lower helms by flying right into them—can you
imagine the shock? We think that having a whale make some noise a few meters off
of our boat is a jolt to the system—imagine one of these flying missiles
connecting with your body in the pitch black.
For those of you who have known us for a while, you may
recall the preparations that we (that is I) made for Y2K- full provisioning,
water, alternative source of cooking, funds, etc for at least 3 months just in
case the Y2K bug resulted in the collapse of society as we knew it at the time.
Well, with this same conservatism in mind, when planning for this trip we
thought it important to have sufficient fuel to be able to motor for some time
should the wind die down. To this end, we already have 700 liters of diesel in
our tanks and so I added containers for an additional 190 liters... total of 890
liters.. each of our engines use about 3 liters an hour while pushing the boat
forward at 5 knots an hour— the math wizzes amongst you will already have
calculated that i have enough fuel to motor about 1,500 miles! For those of you
that are numerically challenge.. round up to a total of 900 liters, if we use 3
L per hour that means we can run an engine for 300 hours and if we go 5 kn in
each hour then it is 1500 nm- that wasn’t tough was it. I didn’t think too much
of it until i was speaking to Paul, a chap that has done the ARC 6 times and
crossed a total of around 20 times and an all round great guy, and asked him
innocently about his fuel situation—he was carrying 175 liters in total and has
bigger engines than I have. As a result, I am the official bulk diesel carrier
for the ARC and available for mid Atlantic delivery at no extra cost!
We had sooo much fun at our little soiree to celebrate
marking the half way point that our entertainment department sent out a Reguest
for Proposal to 3 possible vendors for our next big event— “turning right”. For
the observant ones, you will recall that we had indeed already had a big
“turning right” ceremony but not a party. So we are going to go one better this
time and go wild!
That’s about it for now,
Take care, have a great (whats left of, it) ealry and mid week.
The Crew of Libeccio