Thank You and ...... Tins
Ile Jeudi
Bob and Lin Griffiths
Tue 19 Mar 2013 14:22
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Tuesday 19 March 2013
Thank you to everybody who sent emails to Lin and I
after the Atlantic crossing. I hope I've replied to everyone but if not
please accept my apologies.
At this stage any sense of achievement is overtaken
by a strong feeling of relief. As much as we enjoy sailing and the
boat life we don't especially enjoy long passages and the main objective was not
so much to do a transatlantic but to get our boat to the Caribbean.
Done.
The accepted wisdom for long passages is
to build in contingencies wherever you can. So, if you have a
watermaker you assume it's going to break down on day 2 and carry enough water
to drink anyway - plus 50% more in case there is no wind or you lose the mast
and sails and have to drift across. A functioning watermaker then
just lets you produce more fresh water to shower more often than you might
otherwise.
Similarly, whilst most boats have a fridge
you allow for the possibility of it breaking down at some point and
bring on board lots of tinned food. Within these tinned stores are items
you could eat if the cooker fails! So, like most boats doing a long
passage we have lots of tins, jars, packaged food and bottled
water.
Lin's meal preparations were so good with her
kilner jars etc that we eat fresh food nearly all the way across (we only have a
very small freezer box within the fridge) and we arrived with 99% of the tins we
started with. Imagine the sense of elation then when for dinner on Tuesday
we managed to use up 4 tins (including dessert). When was the last time
you celebrated being able to eat mainly tinned ingredients for dinner? I
think there will be a lot more of that as we go through the iron stores and the
boat's waterline slowly goes down again.
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