Friday night is curry night

Anastasia
Phil May and Andrea Twigg
Sat 26 Nov 2011 01:48
18:40.6N 029:21.8W   1021 miles covered.
Andrea does most of the cooking (in return for not doing the 2200-0200 and 0200-0600 watches), but she has one day off in five.  Tonight it was Bertie's turn to cook and he produced this Indian meal.  From the front we have nan, rice, prawn jalfrezi, chicken tikka masala, sag aloo, vegetable korma and cucumber raita.  The ingredients included Andrea's home-made yogurt and nan dough mixed in the breadmaker.  What a feast.
 
It is Estella's turn next Wednesday and then Ian is really hoping we arrive before 5 December because that is the day he is scheduled to cook.  I put myself down for the Sat 10th December slot but, given Anastasia goes downwind at 4.5 knots without any sails up, it would have to be a real disaster not to arrive before then.
 
 
Food plays a large part of a transatlantic crossing, probably because mostly all we seem to do is eat and sleep, and you can't say a lot about the sleeping part.  In the daily ARC radio net we had reports from all the US boats as to how they had cooked their Thanksgiving turkeys last night and what trimmings they had with it.  Also we heard that one boat lost their genoa halyard and it took three people up the mast to repair it.  We had it lucky with our spinnaker halyard.
 
This morning we finished our two days of bearing south to find wind and we have now started on a direct run to St Lucia.  It will be a couple of days before we know whether coming down here was the right move. 
 
In order to go downwind we had to put up our Parasailor again.  Before we hoisted it we checked the "Dyneema" (strong rope) joints to make sure they were OK, and found they were chafing badly, so we have reverted to using metal shackles until we work out what the problem was.  We don't want to dump our Parasailor into the sea like we did the asymmetric spinnaker (which is still waiting to have the tears taped up in case we need it again). 
 
Now we are going downwind it really feels like we are in the tropics.  A balmy breeze and a gentle swell.
 
Andrea changed the dressing on my finger and it is still looking surprisingly good considering.  In three days the stitches have to come out, which she is not looking forward to doing, and I am not looking forward to having done.  She tells me they don't give you anaesthetic just to take stitches out, but I think she just doesn't want to inject a real finger instead of a chicken leg or whatever they trained on in her medical course.