Tuesday 29th November
Nowcrew
Tue 29 Nov 2005 11:58
In position 22.36N
37.56W
We all got a very
welcome nights sleep last night. With the storm behind us the wind had come
around and we were back on the rhumb line tracking directly towards St Lucia at
a steady 7 knots. Yesterday had been a little frustrating as although we had
sailed along at 8 knots we had not made much ground on our final destination
because the wind was not blowing in the right direction for
us.
Ron & Tom were
on the early morning graveyard shift from 5.00-8.00 am. Andy and Ian had also
climbed out of their bunks and we all had an early morning story telling session
about the previous nights events and then a sing song as we watched the sun
rise. Ron admitted to being in a barber shop singing group in his youth and soon
the harmony came back into the tunes. The scene was set for a glorious days
sailing.
As Andy typed away
at the log all about the big storm Tom started to rustle up one of his now
famous breakfasts. The smell of freshly sizzling bacon soon awoke the rest of
the crew and we assessed the task of cleaning up and drying out the boat. We
rigged up a washing line off the backstays and started to dry everything out.
Nico was on line duty, pegging out the clothes and making sure nothing went
overboard.
The fishing line had
gone out early in the morning and we soon had a bite, was this to be lunch we
thought? As Andy tried to reel it in thinking we had a snared a big fish the
line snapped and we had lost another lure.We decided that the boat was going too
fast to fish and gave up for the day.
Tollers crawled
around the cabin with a vacuum cleaner and Simon set about cleaning out the
galley of the fresh food, a lot of which was starting to go off. We soon
realized that there were still a lot of fresh tomatoes left over and so Ian set
about making a fresh tomato soup for lunch while Nico prepared the veg for the
evening meal.
With everybody
showered and smelling normal again we all pulled out the books and laid out on
deck after lunch to catch a a few rays. Ron&Tom pulled out their book of
"French in tens minutes a day" and soon the franglaise was flowing out of the
main cabin! This was more like what the Cheetham holidays brochure had sold
all the crew before setting sail!
Mid afternoon there
was a cry from Ian " Whale off the starboard bow". Everybody dropped what they
were doing to get a sight of it. It was too far off to see much but there was a
couple of spouts of water and the then first the body and then the tail arched
above the water line. Andy managed to get a shot of it with the camera but it
was not clear enough to post in this diary to come out.
The evening meal has
become one of the major events of the day. We all sat around the table chatting
about hopefully reaching halfway tomorrow evening and discussed some of the race
positions we had been sent through. We think we are about 11th in the fleet of
230 boats and 4th in our class. Considering 30 of these boats are in the
racing class, (we are in a cruising class), we are pretty happy with our
progress to date. We then tucked into a Bails concoction of Loin of pork in
Guinness and everybody was happily fed.
We set up a watch
rota for the evening with a little competition to see who could clock up
the most miles towards our destination on their watch (results tomorrow) and it
was down to double dose of 24 on the video.
The race continued
with some clear competitors to catch!
nowcrew
out!