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Late at night when the sea is black and the moon is
hidden by clouds your mind starts to play some tricks - no more than
with Lizzie. Sharing a watch with her is a little bit like being a
jack-in-the-box. Without any other input she has seen more boats on the
horizon than the entire US fleet. While this might not seem important,
especially when she is wrong again, after four or five days without seeing any
other boats its can get a bit lonely - there is a heck of a lot of water out
here. A testament to this is any feeble attempt to play the simplest of games
- 'I Spy'....it goes like this, I spy something with 'w', you can
guess the rest. This issue of isolation goes so far that at a specific time
there is what can be best described as a pub quiz over the SSB radio. 'The Three
Ferrets, where was Jimmy Hendrix born, over' - yes each boat adopts a pub name
of its choice - surreal! (Hi Nick, Matt, & Jan). Back to Lizzie. When she
shouted 'look over there' we were naturally slow to move, what's it NOT this
time. In fact she had seen a whale about 300 mtrs away to our starboard. While
we like whales we don't want to see them up close - absolute stunning sight but
the whole crew would be much happier if they kept their distance - hit one of
those at 10 kts and it would stop the boat in its tracks.
As always 'the gaffer' was thinking ahead and, to
our surprise, pulled us all together to toast getting half way across. Just
my luck that as this was going on a fish took the hook and chaos ensued. At this
stage it would be a sensible assumption that my drink was spilt - not a bit of
it - it transpires that in the excitement, Pascal drank it.... and then we lost
the fish.
GE is flying along at about 9 knts and we are mid
field. Various tactics are at play with tacks crossing as each boat
positions itself and tacks across each other to pick up the wind and the
best route. The trade winds look set to stay with us for the foreseeable future
which looks good for progress - currnetly we are clocking up 200 mile
days which for a 'cruiser' is a good rate.
All the best from GE and hope all is well back
home, love to all
PS
For those who were wondering what the answer is,
its Seattle
Just a rather nice picture from Lizzie earlier in
the voyage
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