Wednesday 10th |June pm
Catmojo
Matt
Wed 10 Jun 2020 16:11
Hurrah! Under the supervision of the Dutch Fuel Politie, I changed the autopilot to "performance" mode and forced the boat to hold a not-too-pinchy 50degrees off the wind, so we're actually heading (slowly) towards Lanzarote still 1300nm away at an only-slightly-fabulous 4-5kts VMG.
Simon Says we'll need fuel/motor on 4 out of the next 9 days which kinda indicates that's how long he thinks it might take us to get there yet - a week on Friday, he reckons. Maybe!
But Simon also Says he doesn't really know how much fuel we've got on Mojo. The answer is - quite a lot. When sailing the Atlantic there IS actually a substitute for sailing experience and it's called "diesel". With enough diesel you can point the boat straight at the destination and arrive toot suite without any of the rope-twiddling or faffing around with sails that we're doing on Mojo. Cargo ships ferry containerloads of Amazon junk and everything else around the planet like this 24/7/365, and all burning plenty of diesel fuel.
Of course, it helps if you've got sailing experience too on a sailing boat, but a fair bit of that experience might lead you to wish you had more diesel from time to time, due to the often-rubbish winds being somewhat less than advertised.
Some purist sailing types might scoff at taking more diesel than is absolutely needed to get out of the marina and back into another at the other end. But diesel is a potential safety issue - with plenty of diesel you can razz along as fast as possible to (say) get help for medical issues or to help another boat. Well, that's my excuse anyway.
I am hoping to get some extra tanks on Mojo for longer distance sailing, and/or for dodging rapacious fuel stops such as those ratbags in the Galapagos islands. In the Marqueses islands (if a fuel ship hasn't visited them for a while, which is most of the time) they only let visiting boats take as much fuel as any local might need for their car - about 80litres. And in French Polynesia they MAY let you buy tax-free fuel BUT you gotta fill tanks, not jerrycans else you might sell the stuff to other people! So it's an idea to line up and open all the jerrycans ready in a cabin below first, ahem. Or of course, have big fuel tanks. Bigger than that.
Friends on Blue Spirit (Stein and Cecille) back in SXM were chatting with Mike at Shrimpy's Laundry in advance of their transat back to Norway earlier in May and Stein asked him - how much fuel to take? Mike replied immediately that regardless of whatever they had in mind - double it!
Mojo has a 600 litre tank and space for another fifteen jerrycans in the locker space nearby ... plus another forty-something jerrycans on board and we set off with almost 1800litres of fuel. With winds against us almost the whole way so far, we've used over half already. So plenty left.
We put the clocks forward again, and Ampi (and Anna) made pizza for lunch. Fabulous! Doing the washing up I found a rolling pin (obviously needed for rolling out the pizz base) ... but which I don't remember was on board before? Quite true - Ampi actually brought along her own rolling pin! That's a proper chef, I think.
What else? Oh yes, 10th June is the 80th anniversary of France gloriously giving up WW2 as a bad job, signing Unconditional Surrender on a train carriage in Compiegne, near Paris while Charles de Gaulle bravely jumped on a plane and went to live in London for the duration. The Germans made sure it was on train carriage to avenge the 1918 Armistice, also signed on a train carriage, and then made sure that was The End Of It by having the train carriage crushed. I expect they're having lovely train-carriage based celebrations in Compiegne, today, maybe? Oh well, whatever. if you're on a train today you might have a cheese sandwich, say, or perhaps sign your Unconditional Surrender to anyone who surprisingly arrives near your seat "tanked up" so to speak, as a nice gesture Lest We Forget. Anna decided that this is as good an excuse as any to put some champagne in the fridge, definitely an improvement on fizzy water such as er, Vichy. Vive La France!