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11:12 16:59.73N
47:04.18W
Day 17 in the Little Blue household and Barbara
here in the blog room again. We've just had a few excellent days
sailing so morale remains high, even though we still don't know where the water
in the bilges is coming from, and Kevin's eaten all the green muesli bars.
Chris is doing a valiant job of mopping out the water, which is not so much
water as milky brown, gritty, soup. This suggests that at some point
between source and bilge it journeyed through the engine compartment and got
mixed with diesel and sawdust. We are not sure even if it is salt water or
fresh. What we need to do is filter it through a coffee filter, then boil
it up with some of said coffee and taste it: hopefully the crud will be filtered
out/evaporated, and the coffee will mask the worst of the taste while any salt
present will still show up. Then we'll know if we have a hole and are
sinking. Yep, that's what we need to do.
As I said, we've had some great sailing weather -
averaging 6 knots. It's not as fast as we'd hoped but 144 miles a day
isn't too bad - we'll be there in 6 days. Actually, if we went any faster
we would catch up with an area of thunderstorms and gales which have been
terrorising some of the bigger boats. Here we have a nice steady
20-odd knots of wind and some BEAUTIFUL Atlantic rollers to entertain us.
We are heading dead downwind, so the waves come from directly
astern. As it approach it lifts the cockpit up onto its
perfect turquoise crest, and for a moment you feel like you're on top of
the world. As you look forward it's like standing up on top of the North
Downs at Wye, with the whole of Romney Marsh stretching out before
you, some 40 miles to the horizon. There's Aldington, and Woodchurch,
and Hamstreet woods of course, Dymchurch, Romney and on a clear day, all the way
out to Dungerness PowerStation. But just as you are enjoying the view, the
wave passes underneath. If it's comming straight from astern it
will settle you back down so gently you would hardly know you'd been any
where. But when they're off at an angle to the boat, it pitches and rolls
all over the place with much comic effect: coffee gets spilt, books go flying,
and any unsecured passengers lurch and are sat down abruptly in
some rather unexpected places! Every so often one of these charmers sneaks
up to the back of the boat and then breaks straight into the cockpit, dumping a
tsunami full in the direction of the hatch, and down any windows left open - you
know, the ones directly above our beds in the aft cabins. Oh how we
laugh. I must say though, these things are only about 20ft from crest to
trough - I was led to believe they would be bigger. perhaps I
won't say that so loud...
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