Saturday 3rd December
Nowcrew
Sat 3 Dec 2005 13:27
In position 18.24N
48.07W
"Like a
painted ship upon a painted ocean"
Dawn saw a beautiful
sunrise, blue skies with "beaucoup du soleil" and not a cloud in the sky. The
trouble was with that came a big hole in the wind - we were going nowhere
fast.
So yet again it was
on with the engine.
And that was the
story for the rest of the day occasionally we'd get a slight breeze, pull out
the sails and ghost along at 4 knots. But before too long the wind would drop
and we'd have to fire up a gain.
Andy baked bread,
Simon rustled up spaghetti ala tomato for lunch and the rest of the team took
time to chill out, top up tans and dry more damp clothes.
During the afternoon
Dave announced that he'd like to go up the mast while we were at sail. So
laden with cameras up Dave went. We hoped he might see land from up there
but with 800 miles to go maybe we were being a bit too
ambitious.
After 10 minutes of
clanging about Dave came down (a little shaky) with some superb photographs and
video footage. All the laptops onboard now have beautiful B57 screen
savers.
Later on Tom and
Dave broke out the guitars while the crew had their usual sundowner - a bottle
of Rioja.
Simon cooked up pork
roast in marmalade with roast potatoes, sweet corn and peas. Another excellent
meal. In fact it was so good Dave cleaned his plate for the first time on trip
(possibly for the first time in his life).
We had a video
premier of the "rushes" from the first part of the trip and a slide show of the
photographs - the start seemed so long ago.
The world cruising
club positions came in we'd overhauled La Royere, and lost another 20 miles to
Northern winds who is a lot further South than us and therefore must have
stronger winds. Unfortunately Charliz hadn't reported a position yesterday
so we didn't know where we stood against them.
Anyway it's
all looks a bit academic at the moment, with so much motoring going on it's
difficult to know where we stand.
We motored into the
night. Maxsea (our forecasting program predicted the trade winds would arrive at
9pm and at precisely 9pm we felt the slightest breeze on our backs. So it was
off with the engines and up with the sails.
Over the next 2
hours it was like "Billy Smarts" circus on the foredeck. We tried mainsail and
genoa, poled-out genoa alone, genoa and cruising chute twin poled in a
twizzle-rig fashion, cruising chute and main (none of which created much
more 3 knots of speed). We eventually settled on cruising chute alone, which
still gave us only 3 knots but didn't slap and bang around like the white
sails.
We sailed exhausted
andfrustrated on into the black.
Finally a message
for Heather Cheetham (wife of Ron and Mother of Andy), terribly sorry to hear
about your broken arm, hope the operation well and fingers-crossed to an early
recovery.
Nowcew out for
today!