Day 19 April 06
We have said goodbye to Mat, our engineer for the first leg of the trip. He has left the sweltering heat of Brazil for the snows of the French Alps.
There are four new members of the team on board now, Claire, Edd, Anni and Tais. Most of the maintenance jobs on the boat are complete and we depart Saturday morning.
We have cleaned the boat and four people left this morning at 7.30am on a mission to buy enough food for 10 people for the duration of this trip plus a contingency. They returned over four hours later. We do have quite a bit of food left over from the last leg. Pasta supplies were overbought in the Falklands and we have about 1,000 portions of the stuff. I think that will be enough.
Tais is a native Salvadorian, and she (and her four year old daughter) have been helping us. She has been wonderful, taking us to great restaurants and showing us the city and yesterday arranging for some of us to have surfing lessons. (I looked after the bags.) I haven’t got any pictures of the real downtown areas as I left my camera on the boat. Some of the areas we have been require caution. My two most important possessions (after my passport) are my camera and my smartphone so I have been travelling without these when out and about. I do feel a little naked.
I am looking forward to being at sea again. Unfortunately we will have to take down the cool awning at sea. Will I be sea sick again on this leg?
Day 20 April 07
‘All at sea’. ‘Missed the boat’. There are lots of phrases in everyday use of English that hark back to the country’s seafaring past.
Yes, we are all at sea now – we are a smoothly oiled operation and are not organised in a way that the phrase might suggest. Just look at the rota. Nothing stops when you are sailing a boat.
Missed the boat. Thankfully no one missed our departure though Tais only managed to get her renewed passport on the morning of departure. Thank goodness it all worked out well.
Before we left we checked all the 21 seacocks on the boat. A seacock is where a pipe goes through the hull and a stopcock is fixed at this point so that in any emergency you can basically close the hole. You have to check these regularly. In an emergency you might want to close these and you wouldn’t be pleased if you found they had corroded so much that the handle could not be turned!
We all posed for a group photograph before we cast away and started our long voyage across the South Atlantic.
We are going to travel a very long way east, almost to Africa before then turning North towards the Azores. We are taking this course because of the winds. If you are looking at the map it may seem odd but the best winds lay along this route. We want to pick up the strongest trade winds and avoid most of the doldrums. I expect that we will be at sea for about a month.
Day 21 April 08
Our first full day at sea again. Just another gorgeous sunny morning. I didn’t get the dawn watch today but I was up on the observation deck at 7am.
During daylight hours there are two people up there scanning each side of the boat for any whales or dolphins. The first sighting after leaving port was a large turtle on the starboard side. We heard some whales on the hydrophones but haven’t had a sighting yet.
The seats in the cabin are very hard. We tend to spend a lot of time sitting here. I found one cushion that helps. There are several large winches that are often in the sun’s shade so ideal places to sit. I hit on the idea of making a mat of rope to help make them a bit more comfortable. It helped but it wasn’t great.
With a lot of sitting in the cabin there is a lot of conversation. We have set up an initial experiment to find out if we can evaporate water and make some salt. We put 500ml of water into a metal pan. I will report tomorrow on how things worked out.
It is good to be out in the ocean. At the moment the sea bed is 4,000m below us.
Day 22 April 09
We have been sailing on the starboard tack for a couple of days now. We are sailing close hauled, (into the wind) and the boat is leaning over at a significant angle. I took the photo with the tilted horizon to try and demonstrate just how much the boat tilts. This angle certainly makes for interesting adventures as you walk from one place to the next. Good job there are plenty of things to grab.
Sleeping on a slope can be a challenge. How do you stop yourself falling out of your bunk – especially if it is the top one. The answer is to use something called ‘lee cloths’. These are pieces of canvas that act as a wall to stop you rolling out. If the boat is leaning the other way then you end up wedged against the wall. Placing a blanket next to the wall helps a lot.
The experiment to make salt that we started yesterday failed on two counts. We left the tin tray out overnight and it rained. In addition, the cook last night was looking for the tray and couldn’t find it. We forgot to tell her we had borrowed it!
Squalls and grey rain clouds blew over us in the afternoon and those on deck were drenched.
I have been amazed at how the readers of this blog stretch all around the globe, from Karen in Yalding, England to Christine in South Island, New Zealand. There are also readers in Montenegro, Australia, Thailand, USA and France. Thanks for reading these rambling writings. I appreciate it.
Day 23 April 10
Sky. On a boat in the middle of the ocean there are two things that have struck me. One is that there is a lot of salty water covering the earth and surrounding us. The other aspect is the size of the sky. When there are no mountains, trees or buildings to restrict the view then the sky looks awfully big. It is a good feeling to be under a big sky. With nothing to obstruct the horizon any bad weather that may be approaching becomes very apparent. There is no hiding from dark clouds on the horizon.
On our boat that has three sails the ropes are fed into the cockpit in order that you can adjust the sails without having to stagger out on to a heaving deck. There are eleven different ropes that are fed into the cockpit and there are five different winches that can be used to haul in any combination of these ropes. Each rope is a different colour so you don’t get confused and pull in / release the wrong one.
The sailors among you are probably groaning at my choice of the word ‘rope’. I don’t think anything on the boat is called a rope once it has been attached to something. Then it takes on a new word such as halyard or sheet or downhaul or shroud or even running backstay or preventer or topping lift. The list of names seems endless – this is only a selection!
Good news. No one has been sea sick (so far) on this leg.
Day 24 April 11
Last night was one of drama. About 3am on a very dark night we were hit by a squall and were racing along under full sail. Suddenly the wind changed direction dramatically and blew on the other side of the boat. A similar event happened a bit later and it was decided to reef the mainsail. The main halyard that supports the mainsail then broke so it all came down and we ended up sailing onwards using the two fore sails. In all the kerfuffle the boat stopped and the cable for the hydrophone that is towed at all times became wrapped round the rudder.
It is in times like these that you want the skipper to be calm, relaxed and successful at sorting out the problems. Niall exhibited all these qualities in spades.
Niall went up to the top of the mast (31 metres) to inspect the halyard once it was daylight. The sea was too rough to allow any repairs to be made so we are waiting for calmer weather that is forecast for tomorrow.
In the meantime, we have been able to hoist the mainsail part way using a different rope (halyard) that is already in place that is normally used to hoist a storm sail.
All the ropes need to be carefully arranged. You never know when you will want one of them. If you have a rope in a tangle then it becomes useless.
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