Dag 14: The Song
Ronja
Jan Morten Ruud
Mon 7 Dec 2009 12:46
|
Dear readers,
it's been a beautiful night. Guided by the (now
almost) full moon Ronja's been surfing the waves at solid speeds. And the Crew
has gotten a good nights sleep instead of practising squalls slalom. We can feel
it's getting hotter. The upside is that people start showing up early for night
watches (which has not always been the case....) in order to enjoy fresh air
naturally conditioned by a fresh seabreeze. And the counter to Caribia is
ticking downwards. Every 100 miles we start shouting and screaming the following
song:
Fire hundre mil igjen å kjøre
Hjula ruller videre mot sør (OG VEST!)
Fire hundre mil igjen å kjøre
For jeg er en trailersjåfør
Vilde (age 10) thinks it is kind of childish, but
Snorre, Stian and Harald (age 17,16 and 39) are thoroughly enjoying themselves.
When we get to less than 300 miles we will start singing every ten miles and
we'll do the numbers in Danish. Kind of like:
To hunner fir og halv fems mil igen at
køøøøøør
Hjulet rulller videre moooood søøør
To hunner fir og halv fems mil igen at
køøøøøør For jeg er en salamibilsjåfør
We see that our dear friends and esteemed
competitors at Go Beyond have a quiz questions on every blog. Well - here's a
quiz question for you all: WHERE ON EARTH ARE WE? The GPS says that it's less
than 345 miles left, and we see Caribbean islands on the chart plotter.
BUT:
* We have not seen another boat for a looong
time
* On the VHF radio we only hear Finish voices,
including those of our friends at Espoomero.
Could it be that we are on our way to Helsinki?
Could it be that our GPS has switched and is now using alpha testing signals
from the new European or Russian positioning system? And that they have not
ironed out all the bugs yet? And what exactly did the staff at Rolnautic in Las
Palmas mean when they (after some heavy haggling) said "Take these maps instead.
They are much less expensive." and smiled a white-shark-teeth type of
smile?
Hmm. But the water temperature is 26 degrees.
Cannot be Helsinki. It is much more likely that we have mixed ourselves up in a
Finnish Overseas Naval Excersise. Which makes us wonder what course of action we
should take. Should we simply switch flags and enlist? And will we, as fresh
recruits, qualify for free lessons in Finnish? We are watching the situation
closely and will keep you up to date.
Still - the null hypothesis is that we are heading
towards St. Lucia. And here we have two important pieces of news:
1: Our sources tell us that the killer cockroaches
have been retrained and will now only go after boats with teflon bottom paint.
However, since they originally were trained to go after all Norway-registered
boats, we advice all Norwegian boats to keep a sharp lookout for swimiming
cockroaches fitted out with diving equipment in the Martinique St.Lucia channel.
2: We have worked intensely with our department of
strategy and covert operations at HQ in RG22, and we have made a number of
changes and improvements to secret weapon number 2. So many, indeed, that we now
call it secret weapon version 2.2, and we consider the plan close to perfect.
(Important note to HQ at RG22: Remember not to launch the choppers until target
vessel (Code name: "Go Behind") is within a range of 5 - five -
miles from Pigeon Island and the tide
riffs! It's expensive and noisy and could attract unwanted
attention!)
Despite our pleas with ARC management, we have seen
no signs of WIFI coverage even though we are only 48 hours away from Rodney Bay.
A bummer, because we cannont wait to use Opera Turbo - the new version of the
Opera Web Browser. Sailors and other frequent public WIFI users should give it a
spin. Originally developed for mobile devices using slow and expensive mobile
networks, Opera compresses the content on their servers before sending it to the
end user. The result is much less traffic and a faster web experience. But
with our Inmarsat rate of 87 US cent per 160 characters we are careful even to
use Opera Turbo!
And that is all the news from your affectionate
Crew aboard S/Y Ronja. Best regards from Vilde, Vibeke, Stian, Snorre, Jan
Morten & harrall.
Coordinates: N16.08.963.,
W55.30.453
Distance totalt current rute: 2720 Nm Sailed distance last 24 hours: 176Nm Sailed distance since start: 2463Nm Distance left (current route to St. Lucia): 325Nm |