Day 12 Thursday - Water, water everywhere..

Quesera
Thu 4 Dec 2008 15:49

 

……But sadly not from our watermaker.

 

We had a reasonable night flexing between 3 (too slow) and 6 (perfect) knots. Having ‘ turned right’ as it were we now have the wind slap behind us (well not a slap more of a pat really!) and this can be a difficult point of sail as the wind does flex by up to15 degrees on one side or the other, occasionally more. And whilst poled out and in the black of night – and with the clouds it was very black – one doesn’t want to be gybing the whole time. So we have to make a decision before dark (6pm) as to what sail plan, gybe and direction we want, and it’s guesswork. As one can’t sail the rhumb line we have to decide whether to aim off 10 degrees Nor S. Having been going more southerly yesterday, we chose north. It seems to have been the right decision given the wind shift. Because of the squally forecast we  didn’t carry a spinnaker. This was the safe and right decision but in fact such squalls as we met were light and if we had carried the spin we might have made more ground.

 

Yes, there a lot of water around and not much on it. We saw 2 boats yesterday late evening taking a more southerly direction over the horizon and two tankers but that’s about it. A lovely day emerged from the morning gloom, mainly blue skies with a few clouds and a steady 13/15 kt breeze giving us around 6 kts. But we know we are heading for a trough of low pressure ahead.

 

The watermaker had been fine and had produced lots of lovely water until yesterday afternoon when we ran out so I went to make some more, to no avail. And still nothing after several attempts. I have a big e-mail from the supplier to work through in the hope of getting it up and running. We immediately went into emergency conservation mode which is to turn off the water pump and only use a hand pumped tap and wash up in sea water etc. Not very pleasant!

(subsequent note – got this going again late morning).

 

One irritation about all of this is that the watermaker is under my bed (or should that be bunk?) in the front cabin. So I have to take all the bedding out and fold over the mattresses to lift the hatches to get to the innards underneath.  See pic below. But maybe the reason I say bed is because it is actually pretty comfortable. You can see the sprung mattresses folded over on the right (they zip together) and they lie on springy slats (far right and to the rear) which is really good – one of the better boatshow purchase decisions in my view!

 

Jock wanted me to show you his sleeping accommodation by comparison. Its perfectly suitable for crew as far as I am concerned!

 

             

 

Disruption to my comfort.......                                                             Whilst the cabin boy has his.......