Weeding in the Atlantic
Scot Free III
Frank & Anne
Thu 23 Feb 2017 06:51
Wind F3-4 S, cloudy with occasional heavy rain. Forecast: wind due to back round to E and drop slightly to F3 before picking up again to F4/5 late Thursday/Friday.
We have had our first real tropical downpour giving the sails, boat and A. a good soaking, whilst I was asleep.
The podcasts have been a huge success. You can potter about on deck and listen, which you can't do with a book. Although we each downloaded a batch, before we left, one of the unexpected delights is dipping into an enormous file of mp3s given to us by a Polish skipper we met, in Cape Verde, last year. She loved audio books and she kindly filled my laptop with her collection. Buried in there was a series by Bill Bryson, reading his own account of returning to the USA after 20 years in the UK. His description of how gardening differs in the US and UK and the comparative weeding techniques was highly entertaining.
We have been doing a bit of our own weeding here. The veg. needs constant attention to weed out any rot and stop mould spreading and I weed the sprouting shoots on the potatoes, although I'm not quite sure why. It just makes them look fresher. The biggest weeding job is to take the boathook and "hoik" the large clumps of weed that gather on the rudder of the windvane steering system. There are huge carpets of floating weed in this part of the Atlantic. If you don't catch it early, the weight and drag, of an increasing collection of weed, is so great that the safety mechanism of the rudder is tripped and allows it to pop-up and you loose self steering. It's a quick job: harness on, climb out onto the sugar scoop, clear the weed, dismantle the Windpilot, lift the rudder out reset it, and put it all back together. Tackling bindweed is easier!