32:50N 47:04W
All fine, 6-7 knots. Nice and sunny yet again.
We had the parasail and genoa up
together yesterday, all fine throught the evening and even had double digit
speeds now and again, but I was woken at 4am to help with a twisted up rope
goulash on the foredeck. Nick on
watch went up and hauled the whole lot back into the foredeck locker, whilst I
whammed the engines downwind to minimise apparent wind on the whole thing. Very impressive from Nick, and I told
him so. Think he feels it oughtn’t
to have got twistified in the first place whilst he was on watch. Heyho.
So we’re back to just the genoa
and 6-7 knots darnit. An
interesting morning of unravelling a 156sqm sail awaits.
The port engine (left hand side,
darling) also seems to go on holiday from time to time, gently losing revs
sometimes, which I reckon is a fuel problem. I put in new fuel filters a couple of
days ago, but seems the problem might be further up in the tank, so I plan to
apply a bit of compressed air upstream from the filters to clear it out.
Meanwhile the Raymarine nav gear
is playing its usual truancy games.
The wind indicator goes dead every few days and we have to recalibrate it
by going round in circles three times, turn it on and off etc etc. Oh, and there’s the radar as well, also
Raymarine. One electronics guy told me
that this is sposed to be very posh gear. Yeah, that sounds right -
this radar is so high class that it simply ignores any boat that hasn’t
been formally introduced.
David has been telling Joe all
about the Kraken, the fabled sea monsters.
Apparently, the Kraken live on a diet of potato peelings and fat
people. So, appropriately enough,
David made some fab food for lunch yesterday, with hamburgers, potatoes
(peelings over the side for the Kraken) and fruit salad crepes, but for evening
meal we just had a snack, to avoid getting fat and hence being eaten by a
Kraken.
Lots of other boaty problems, as
is normal. The door handle to Lee’s
cabin fell off and one of the gas rings is a bit spluttery. Even worse on Barry’s boat – he says
he’s had a serious disaster – they’ve run out of butter. Hopefully he’ll be able to call out a
rescue helicopter to drop a few packets of Lurpak on his foredeck.
