No Horse to throw overboard?

Stargazer of Southampton
Susie and Adam (both think they are skipper)
Thu 24 May 2012 20:56
2405:12, 28:54.96N 55:29.15W
 
I am not sure if throwing horses overboard is mandatory when entering the Horse latitudes – but we have no horse. . . we had lovely sailing for the past 24 hours, slight seas, sunshine, 10 knots of wind and Stargazer trucking along at 6 knots – that was until lunchtime today when the wind stopped.  
 
Overnight had been beautiful, we sleep in the back cabin when sailing and each of us had the best sleeps so far – the boat gliding along meant it was silent with only a gentle rock.  When Adam woke me up at 10pm for my shift I was that much asleep that I got all confused with dreams and announced ‘who are you? – you must be me and I am doing 6 knots so where am I?’. . .it took me a couple of minutes to wake up!  hmmmm.  I think I was dreaming that I was sailing the boat.  I had the same fun waking Adam up at 2am, he was less cryptic than me and greeted me with ‘where am I? what time is it? what day is it. .  . actually the day doesn’t matter really does it?’ 
 
The stars were bright overnight with no moon and phosphorescence sparkling in the sea around us.   All very nice – but now we have to motor to get through the high pressure and out to the other side so that will take us a while and mean fewer miles covered each day – at least we have been able to do some tidying and such like.  Now we will do some book reading!
 
 
Strangely Adam found a 7 inch long fish in the cockpit today on the seat. It must have landed there overnight, it is usually where Adam sits when he is on watch so a bit of a shame for the fish that Adam wasn’t sat there at the time as he could have thrown it back in. .  alhtough the shriek from Adam would have been funny.  It must have done some jump to get into the cockpit since it wasn’t even a flying fish.  We were wondering if this is the reason we find fish scales on deck – we found huge scales the size of a thumbnail after the crossing to the Caribbean and I found some the other day on the leeward deck – thinking that maybe sometimes quite big fish do end up being washed on board but perhaps most of the time they manage to flap themselves back into the sea.
 
 
 
Nothing else to see other than miles of flat sea and the birds which are still about, they fly quite close to the boat and incredibly close to the water with their wingtips about an inch above the surface – assume they are looking for fish just under the surface.  We’ve seen no other fish or anything – I think I saw a portuguese man’o war jellyfish though but that amounts to all the wildlife.  it’s still a nice 28 degrees during the day so you can’t really complain about the weather.