" A LADY " Sailing around the World, ( presently sailing from the Galapagos to the Marquesas Islands)

A Lady
Stephen Hyde
Fri 12 Mar 2010 11:26
Before I start on the blog, its amazing the things that happen when sailing in these waters, but just now I heard a faint rattle,
like something hitting the canopy or the railings or something, I couldent figure it out, looked around the deck and nothing there,
I definatly heard something !  you know on a boat at night, your ears are fine tuned to the slightest strange sound or if the motor is running , the slightest change in pitch causes alarm bells to ring.........
 
Its 03.00hrs , so I decide to make a cup of " Barry's" tea, so into the galley, which has its red night light on, so its dim in there,
Oh shit ! what do you think I just stood on, yes a big flying fish, The strange sound was him crashing through the Galley window, poor thing,
 
 
THURSDAY  11th March  2010      Day 4 at sea,
Crew:-  Stephen Hyde, Aileen Hyde, Donal (Fats) Mc Clement
Miles to the Marquesas......................................2230 N.Miles
 
04.00hrs Its very cloudy now, having had so many stars earlier in the night,
The wind is 18knots and we are sailing along at 8.8knots, which is a good speed,
 
08.00hrs Still plain sailing , still have 2 reefs in the main and doing 8.8knots,
The skipper ,full of energy decided to changr the filters on the sea fresh watermaker, the existing ones were manky,
covered in a muck from the harbour in the galapagos, this operation took about an hour
and certainly the boss lost a pint of liquid from persperation loss working in the engine room.
 
12.00hrs Fat's gets the Radio operating again for the daily fleet contact, again we could hear everyone clearly, but they could not hear us.
But, ( there is always a but )  FATS just would not give up , and eventually got  " eowyn" on the radio and got our message off to them.
One of the problems, apart from the fact that our radios are basically not working well, is we are travelling along
much faster than the rest of the fleet, At this stage we are at least 100 miles ahead of " Eowyn" and 300 miles ahead of others,
 
We seem to have a stream of wind all of our own, most of the time we have around 20 knots , occasionally going down to 10 knots
and other times going up to 28 knots.
 
14.00hrs Lunch was basically a cold meat salad by " Fats" made from the leftovers of the last few days. and it tasted great,
Food on a boat always taste's great, reminds the skipper of west Cork on " Cruachan" with the Old Man ( John Hyde)
cooking tins of Irish Stew mixed with red beans, ( yeach) but to us kids, it tasted like " liquid goose "
 
After lunch, we did lots of cleaning , polishing and clothes washing, thats because the day has turned into the best day we have had in ages,
and progress is excellent, so we are all delighted with ourselves....
 
We all got into reading, Fats with his Suduko book, and the rest read about the Paradise Islands we are sailing to now.
 
20.00hrs, Fats did the dinner, Gammon chops with spuds and veg, tatsy, tasty,.......very, very tasty.
 
After dinner chat was short  , Basically we have temporarlly run out of people to bitch about.
 
The night watgh is as follows :-     Fats,..........22.00hrs ........to     02.00hrs
                                                  Skipper......02.00hrs.........to     06.00hrs
                                                  Aileen........06.00hrs ........to 10.00hrs
 
Thats it for today
 
Signed     Stephen Hyde    ( Skipper )