Crip Ship
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Sat 9 Apr 2011 08:42
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Saturday 9th April 1416 Local Time, 0816
UTC
06:31.77N 083:16.53E
After Trish's strange but painful accident she has
been trying to rest with her leg up and ice on her foot........... in between
cooking all the meals still! What a hero. Don't get me wrong she had loads of
offers to stand in but she wasn't having any of it and hopped around the galley
for the past two days.
That's the good news.
The bad news is we have now reached the last hour
or two of the fuel in our tanks and we are still experiencing little or no wind.
For example just now it is oily smooth outside.
We have been able to pick up a light breeze
during the night and we have been able to ghost along under the stunning skies
with shooting stars ..... well, shooting. Spectacularly. Sometimes you
wonder how there are any stars left in the sky. So still was the sea and so
quiet was the air around about me on my watch last night that you could hear
fish splashing and regular blows presumably from unseen dolphins. It would have
been more magnificent if i knew how or when we might reach Sri Lanka. Or why our
boat seems to be consuming fuel at a rate one third more than it used to. It is
also putting out a lot more smoke than normal. Could it be the fuel? Could it be
something that happened during the service that I had expected to improve fuel
consumption? We will have had about 38 hours less engine time from our tanks
than normal. That is about 300 miles worth of motoring. It is also outside any
normal expectations that you could have no wind for this whole passage.
The minute we get four knots of wind its up with
the spinaker and off we toddle at two knots. Six knots would give us almost
four knots of boat speed. That is a good performance from a big girl like
the yacht Rhiann Marie. However it is not with out tremendous frustration and
teasing and cajoling, trimming and sheeting. We have sailed about 85 of the two
hundred miles we need to sail without engine and the forecast does not give
us any real hope ..... unless we can pick up some coastal influences (or fuel)
as we get nearer Sri Lanka.
I have been in touch with an agent in Galle who
warns me not to set foot in Sri Lanka without first clearing in, and only Galle
in the south is a clearing in port. I may possibly be able to reach the coast
tomorrow night or Monday morning if we get the breeze during the night but that
is still sixty miles away from Galle.
We now have no possibility of running our generator
as the fuel level in the tank is now too low to feed it. We are almost
out of water, but only for washing etc. We have plenty tonic and plenty drinking
water too. I see from the forecast that some wind is due to the east of us on
Tuesday......
Oh yes. Crip ship. I am absolutely not interested
in hearing from the PC Gestapo who says "you can't say that". Yes I can. I just
have and to confirm my right I will repeat it again at the end of this
paragraph. We have Trish with her bandaged foot who is more than a little
crippled and I still walk like a Thunderbird till the hinge installed in my
back seizes up. Yes I am temporarily crippled. Crip - short for cripple - on a
boat (ship). Crip Ship.
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