Day7 - Boxing Day - 135nm
Mor Toad / Moy Toad
David and Jocelyn Fawcett
Fri 26 Dec 2014 13:07
As you can hopefully see from the pictures we had a good Christmas Day, weather perfect, sea relatively calm and we sailed along at 4-5 knots after lunch with the Yankee and small cruising Shute. Couldn't have been better and it did allow us to have the Christmas dinner I'd planned. In fact think they were the best roast potatoes I'd ever done (but that's the last drop of oil used up) . The chicken was vacuum packed already cooked but very tasty and we did have gravy too. An excellent bottle of white wine too so we toasted absent family and friends. Amazing how good the wine tastes when you haven't had any for a while. This was followed by Christmas pudding with squirty cream. The pudding came from Dan's mum and is really good.
It's amazing how quickly things can change at pudding time the boat started to roll and the wind got up and has remained that way ever since. So we 'rockin and a rollin' again but the good news is we have been making a pretty good 6+ knots overnight and are moving along well at the moment. We may hit another patch of calm later but the forecast is now looking good for the next week so hopefully we shall get a few miles under our belt. It even rained in the night and today it's cloudy but not cold.
It's amazing how the days get filled and yesterday David and Dan had to deal with the generator which fingers crossed has behaved since. It turned out to be a broken rubber impeller on the raw water pump. They not sure why which is of concern as we only have 2 spares left and still A long way to go. They have done a lot of sail changing in the past few days. Yesterday they whipped the main halyard where it chaffes at the top of the mast. Dan also sorted the problem of ' why when we flushed the forehead loo the auto pilot went off' - it turned out the skipper had on installing the electric heads had run the cable across the flux gate compass that controls the autopilot !!!! Moving the cable 9 inches seems to have solved the problem. So never a day goes past without something needing sorting or fixing. Now they are trying to sort the AIS out which is working but gives interesting messages. Dan is trying to work out where we use voltage with great success which helps to save running the generator for as long preserving fuel.
When Merryn left the boat she whispered to HG ' I'm going to leave you 'Fellow Mellow' Apparently he is an imaginary friend and she said this one is Mr Fix It. Thank you Merryn because HG and Daddy have done quite a bit of fixing with his help in the last week and no doubt there will be more.
When we send this we shall have been at sea a week. Skipper and crew still all in fine form though yesterday we all acutely felt the absence of Alex , Merryn and Sam and the rest of the family too - Ol and Linda at The Boathouse in Cornwall and Tanya and family in Australia.