wet cabin ! 20:42.27N 30:29.3136W

Atlantic Vets Blog
Paul Milnthorpe / Jim Houlton
Sun 24 Jan 2010 09:07

Hello, sorry for lack of blog yesterday, things got a bit on the interesting side!

Firstly we hope you can now se our position on the map above the blogs on this mailasail blog site, many thanks to Graham for sorting that for us.

Yesterday morning we felt like we had had a good night with out falling asleep while rowing and we felt we had made good progress however on receiving the position of us in relation to the other boats it was clear that they were making better progress than us-very annoying. About midday we were heading just South of West with a following wind and the waves going the same direction us but we just didn’t seem to be moving. When we were not rowing we were moving at about 1.3 knots and with us rowing as hard as we could we were really struggling to get 2knots. This was very frustrating and we could not work out why. We checked to see if anything was stuck around the rudder and even jumped into the water in quite big swells (tied on to the boat) to see if there was anything stuck to the underside slowing us but again there was not. We figured that we must be in some strange ocean current or something as a very frustrating hour we started to move normally again.

In the afternoon I (Jim) was in the cabin and Paul was rowing, I had the tiny hatch at the back of the cabin open a little to let some air in when Paul said he saw two waves come from 90degrees apart and meet right behind the boat. The resulting huge wave came right over the cabin and landed on the deck! Luckily Paul managed to shout ‘SHUT THE HATCH’ so I had grabbed the handles of the hatch when the wave hit but not managed to secure it. About 40L of salt water managed to get into the cabin soaking everything in our normally damp but dry living quarters. If Paul had not shouted and I had not been holding onto the handles I think that we would have had a foot of water in the cabin rather that an inch or two. Today (Sunday) who ever is not rowing will be washer woman trying to rinse the salt out of all our wet clothes, sleeping sheets etc as last night was very uncomfortable sleeping on one wet roll mat with no sheet or pillow.