Plodding on to the Azores
Cat-man-do
Mon 19 May 2008 01:30
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Well, as the laptop appears to be working for the
minute, I thought I'd put pen to paper, so to speak.
It's been a crossing of many variables so far,
after some pretty lousy weather at times, we actually managed 24 hours or so of
decent winds and managed to put in about 137 miles yesterday. Tonight however
the wind has died again and we were languishing along at about 2.5 knots which
isn't a lot of good to anyone. So we had chat and decided to use some of our
valuable fossil fuels and have some help from the engines for the night, or at
least until the winds fill in again. Finally managed to get a Grib (weather)
file downloaded today for the next few days and it looks like light winds all
day tomorrow then hopefully filling in again come the Monday night or the early
hours of Tue. The only downside to that would appear to be that it's going to
bring rain with it. If we're honest though, we'll live with that to get some
decent mileage in towards the Azores.
When we get there, we shall re-fuel and water and
re stock some of the food supplies. We'll also have a fair bit of work to
do on the boat including another trip up the mast to fix some problems up there.
Hopefully by the time we leave, we'll have a full compliment of sails to use. At
the moment we can only use the Jib (the smaller of the headsails) and a reefed
Main (made smaller than full size) so, it's a bit like driving a car but
only having 3/4 throttle available. Not ideal if your trying to make some decent
mileages.
We had another close escape today when it was
noticed that the pin through the Gooseneck (which attaches the boom to the mast)
had just about fallen out. I've never been happy with the design of this part on
the boat and luckily it was spotted before it fell out which would have caused
all sorts of problems. We'll keep a close eye on it for now, but I'll be
designing a new pin for it and getting it made up as soon as possible.
We've had Dolphins swimming with the boat today,
always a nice sight when you've not seen them for a while. Also off in the
distance a Whale blowing quite frequently.It didn't come very close but we
did get to see its' back as it arched out of the water before diving.
It looked fairly big even from afar but we weren't able to identify
it.
That's about it for now, hopefully the laptop will
hold together so we can post some more and keep in touch with people, but I'm
not too confident about that to be honest.
Take care of yourselves back home and thanks for
reading
Brian & Andrew x
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