Trade Winds ast last 13:12.363N 44:07.811W

Shaya Moya
Don & Susan Smyth
Sun 5 Dec 2010 16:48
The mood on board has become more upbeat suddenly, could the advent of the trades have had anything to do with it? Or could it be that we nearly broke the magical 200nm a day run at 196nm, or matybe it is because we have less than 1000nm to go. Now Tony is running a sweepstake on how many days left 5 days or 6?  I guess a sum of all of these, plus seeing another yacht overtake us, taking two days to do so has got us fired up.
 
 
 
                    We could always go that way!!!!!!!!                                                                                    What to cook? what to cook?
 
We have had some wonderful spinnaker runs, but today was too hairy with the wind gusting and changing direction. Who needs it, we are doing over 8,5kts on main and genoa alone.
Reece is the chef on duty today, and having caught his biggest Mahi Mahi yesterday, has decided on a fish curry for tonight, washed down with a bottle of bubbly to celebrate all of the above. Not too shabby!
I guess a lot of you are wondering what do we do all day, how do we keep ourselves occupied? With five of us on board we have an allocated chef of the day who provides acooked meal midday and evening, does all the galley cleaning and washing up etc. That is a very busy day, but you get to have the night off and can get 8 hours straight sleep.
 
 
 
            Internet Dating is cool                                                                                                A moments down time
 
For the rest of us we have a couple of 3 hour night watches together with a 4 hour day watch to keep us busy tending sails, adjusting course , watching out for rogue waves, other boats and anything that might be chaffing in the rigging. This gets rid of quite a bit of time. Couple this with doing the washing of clothes and ourselves eats up the time. Dave as 1st Mate has in addition the navigational tactics to come up with. As skipper there seems to be a host of odd jobs that occur, from diagnosing and fixing a hiccuping generator, to finding more space in the tender to store the garbage.
 
 
 
                With great aplomb he conjures up a meal                                                                        Thanks Gavin in New Zealand
 
This still leaves time for some zzz's in the afternoon, catch up on reading, teaching Tony and Jane something each day about running an ocean going yacht, and with the help of the Satelite email a bit of banking. We then have to fit in blogging, fishing, bread making, emailing, to say nothing of cleaning, vacuuming and generally keeping theyacht ship shape, phew not enough hours in the day!!!