Tuesday 16th pm
Catmojo
Matt
Tue 16 Jun 2020 15:56
Hooray, the wind turned south showing 10knots so we flung up the mainsail with a reef, lifted the boom for a nice curvy sail shape and Mojo is charging along at 9 knots, touching 10, apparent wind 11 at 70degrees.
The crew can pretty much do all the sail-raising/lowering stuff on their own now, and there's not too much giggling at my boaty-jargon explanations that the rope for adjusting the front sail is called the "jib sheet" and the other not-currently-used one the "lazy sheet", unless the wind is on the other side and then they swap names, er obviously. You can still tighten the front sail though, as far as I'm concerned, but it's nice to know what people on other boats are on about if they say it's "over-sheeted" - they mean it's too tight. Yes, they I suppose they could say "it's too tight" but never mind.
More boaty stuff with finding a scuffed bit of the second reefing line, so surgical fingers were deployed to do some whipping. And earlier we even used a rolling hitch to keep hold of one line and transfer power to another. That's almost enough boaty stuff for one day so Yes, alright we can get the washing machine going and watch the third Pirates of The Caribbean film after lunch, all whilst piling along at 9+knots. Most other transat boats aren't like this yerknow, I'm just saying. Perhaps at least we oughta put the top back on the washing detergent in between washes what with, yerknow, sometimes doing ten knots?
As we near Europe we have to move the clocks forward another hour, but the crew say they're having just too good a time today, so maybe we can we please wait till tomorrow and make that day shorter instead of this one? Erm, it's only the time on the clock that changes yerknow? Oh whatever, alright. We'll move to GMT-1 and then GMT in Lanzarote which I think is GMT, not sure...
Sam needs confirmation that ALL countries follow GMT? Yes, Greenwich Mean Time - they don't have their own versions - Planet Earth follows GMT with local time differences plus or minus up to 12 hours. They have maps that put their country nicely in the middle, but if someone pilots a plane, captains any ship, is involved in international trade or politics or programs a computer, they use English, and a time reference and planetary navigation system based in London. But anyway you were saying bit worrying that the UK is gonna be All Alone? Hum, maybe.
Hi to Tony back in SXM who experimentally guessed at the Mojo email address and which worked perfectly. Tony helped me buy this boat in Greece in 2017 and sell some others some years earlier in SXM. More recently he helped a bunch of us boaties move out from the lagoon anchorage - we couldn't move without the bridge opening but the bridge won't open until we paid, but the office where we could pay was in Philipsburg, and not allowed to travel to Philpsburg ... and Tony helped us cut that Gordian Knot. Thanks again, Tony. One of these days he might get round to seeing Mojo but he is always Frantic Busy!
Yet another fabulous bug in the Raymarine Axiom chartplotter software which has already cleverly reduced the number of possible bugs by ditching important features such as VMG (sog x Cosine of the angle between bearing and cog if they might like to try adding it so that yerknow it becomes useful for boats further away that Portsmouth is from the office in Havant) but before that, when you edit the on-screen data fields, when a data field is already located at the top of the page and made small, the field disappears under the icon saying "add fields" so I can't point to the flipping field any more without the software saying What field would you like to add? ... and I wanted to edit the one just under that dialog box, dammit.
Quote from Sam - "On a tennis court your racket is meant to feel like a natural extension of your arm, and I've now learnt that the boat and the open ocean is a natural extension of the soul." The boat has run out of cheese, but Sam's quotes haven't.