21:50S 004:11W
Tales of Amok's Adventures
Mike Jones
Sat 13 Feb 2010 21:51
We first saw the sun today at sunset, it has been one of the few overcast and cloudy days we've had. The wind's direction has been fairly steady from the East, sometimes even with a sprinkling of north in it which allows us to make an extremely good course over the ground towards our destination of Cape Town, completion of phase 1. The sea has a fair swell to it, maybe a 3 metre height, which sometimes comes over the deck at us. Luckily our dodger does a great job of shielding us from the worst of it.
Our sunrises have been coming earlier and earlier, and they now appear whilst the 3-6 watch is underway. It's the strangest thing to go below decks at 10 to 6, then to come up 10 minutes later to find that somebody has turned the big light on. There is also a brief sense of "lucky me, I was the only one who got to see the sun come up".
We made a great red thai fish curry with Toby's fish from yesterday, once again the cooker decided not to play ball. So it had to wait til today.
Sometimes, in the UK in the dead of winter, there is a program on TV after lunch on Sundays called SKI SUNDAY. Occasionally, something interrupts the broadcasting of this program ,(usually excessive snow duh) and the programmers then run around like mad to try to fill the slot with something as equally exciting as downhill slalom racing. One activity which they THINK meets this criteria is an annual championship in which husband and wife teams compete against each other whereby the husband has to carry the wife on his back while wading through a mud filled swamp. Of course, many of them are red-necks and they all talk with a very strong accent. no further clues here...
After some considerable thought, Mike and I have decided to start a new competition to provide some additional excitement for the programmers. It would be entitled "The Great Finnish Cooker Dismantling Contest whilst sailing to windward in a choppy sea- HUSBAND and WIFE teams. We believe that our recent numerous experiences of dismantling the Finnish cooker under these conditions, we think we would be able to give any other team a serious run for their money. Just to make the competition more interesting, the manufacturer decided to make it as exciting as possible, by fine tuning the following design points.
1) do not provide any sensible installation drawings, so end users have to work it out for themselves
2) do not provide any additional length of any of the electrical leads so end users need to disconnect everything before doing anything. (One person, let's just say the wife here for example) has to hold cooker steady, irrespective of vessel heave whilst other one has to break all the connections. Usually the muscles of the holder start to shake just before the last connection is broken. argh.
3) Make it necessary for the entire cooker to be dismantled in order to get to the guts of it.
4) For the oven, position the fuses at the very far back corner so end users have to stand on their head to change them whilst the other person presses on the cooker to get it to swing forward to allow the fuses to be reached.
5) For the internal parts, only use very sharp stainless steel pieces which will cut the end users if they so much as look at them.
Well finally we got it going not by any logical mechanism or by black magic all that can be revealed is that the camel method was used. Reference the saga of the arab trying to get his camel to run in the desert.
Which reminds me of a Finn and a Norwegian are sat drinking together in a bar and on the first day nothing is said, on the second day nothing is said and on the third day the Norwegian can't stand it anymore and says "Nice weather" to which the Finn responds "Are we here to drink or have a conversation?"
Amok out...
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