Six Quid on it

Serendipity
David Caukill
Wed 10 Aug 2011 11:59

Wednesday August 19th - Today’s Blog by David – 28:54.995N 13:42.345W

 

Well - we made it.  We arrived in Puerto Calero around 07.00 this morning after a nearly four day passage from Gibraltar.

 

Until we got within a couple of miles of Arrecife, we hadn’t seen anything for two days:  no boats, whales, dolphins etc.  – save for the odd bird as we neared land.   In fact, the last two days we have not been closer than 3 kilometres to anything we knew about - that includes the bottom of the ocean which was more than 3000 metres away for most of the journey.  

 

For the record, we arrived with 53 cans of Greene King Abbot Ale – (with four men on board, someone clearly has not been pulling (!?!) his weight!). Secondly, it wouldn’t take a forensic pathologist to work out what carnage had occurred on the afterdeck so we are keeping the authorities at arm’s length.  

 

The journey itself was largely downhill - wind behind us of varying strengths. When it died down we flew the spinnaker:

 

 

and when the wind piped up we took it down again and reverted to the trade wind rig:

 

 

As John implied yesterday the constant up and down consumes time and costs us miles (possibly up to three)  because we slow down while we launch and recover the spinnaker.  So it is a decision that we do not take lightly – but we did get reasonably adept at it with Bob orchestrating the process from his hatch (down which the spinnaker lives):

 

 

Susie reports that during her 02.00-05.00 night watch  with Dad, as we approached Lanzarote she felt sure she could smell land – many sailors report this phenomenon – however, it was probably more agricultural then one might have expected. Close investigation showed that this coincided with Dad having emptied the “Holding Tanks” . [The output from the Heads is ‘held’ temporarily in  “Holding Tanks” until the boat is far from civilisation when the contents are evacuated somewhere chosen so that they can do least harm to civilisation. That there was an agricultural smell is consistent with that process].  

 

As we came into the port this morning and were setting up mooring lines and fenders there was an eerie wail from the foredeck – neither pleasure nor fright – more abject terror!  It was similar in pitch to the cry heard when dolphins had been sighted …. but tinged with the anguish of learning that someone had burned down London (cant leave you guys to run a cake shop can we?). It transpired that Susie had made a new acquaintance – but one that  she had no intention of developing:

 

 

A Squid. …  It was sick, really sick …. quite probably dead.    I’d bet Six Quid on it………(Urrrggh!).   Anyway – it has now been deep sixed!