Day 18 of Atlantic Crossing
Swiftwing
Wed 12 Dec 2007 22:57
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Lat/Lon at 1200 GMT: 14:31.11N
47:11.09W
Guess what
broke today, go on, you'll never guess.
The emergency
tiller - used by the self steering gear to steer the boat - all
but snapped off this morning, parting at the weld that held it to the rudder
shaft. Alan and Neil took up the challenge, as our feelings towards manually
steering for days and nights on end haven't changed, and quickly managed to
bodge a fantastic repair which (so far) has held without any
problems.
A few people
have been emailing asking for photo's to be put up on the blog. The reason we
haven't posted any photos is that the satellite phone gives a very slow internet
connection. For pictures to be sent at all they need to be shrunk to a very poor
quality and even then, in spite of our mail-compression software, the connection
needs to be held for at least five minutes. With the roll of the boat the phone
is struggling to get a fix even for the 30 seconds it takes to send text emails,
so would not manage to send the time-consuming photos. Don't worry though,
we are putting together an album of the best pictures which we will post on the
blog as soon as we have a WiFi connection on land. This will allow better
quality photo's to be posted, and save us a bit of time and money. Anyway,
aren't out astonishing journalistic skills good enough? Do we not paint a
picture in your minds with our flowing words?
The rest of the
day went by fairly uneventfully. We had what claimed to be Chinese soup for
lunch and both Dougie and myself exelled ourselfs with tea tonight. Douglas
"Ramsay" Reid decided to use up the odd tins so made a stew of two tins of, err,
stew, 2 tinned full english breakfasts and one tin of ravioli, served
with boiled tatties. In charge of desert and struggeling to find
anything suitable, John "Rhodes" Sutherland ended up mixing a carton of
custard with a tin of summer fruits. Everyone agreed it was a fine
meal.
Well, I must
sign off as I'm on watch in a few minutes.
John
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