35:45N 45:47W Teased by the wind

The Snark on The ARC
Ben Little
Fri 20 May 2011 06:03
Evening all!!
Today was most frustrating as we began the day so
well with the wind on our beam at last and though there was not a lot of it we
managed to get almost 6 knots out of 6 knots of wind and thankfully after 5 days
of engine the boat was silent. Sadly by afternoon the wind had died away
and the sea had taken on its' familiar glassy texture. The jelly fish had
re-appeared, and on a brighter note, the dolphins. I have this suspicion
that they are scaring away all our fish however.
Despite all this we are all fully alert and taking
our duties on the helm seriously as can be seen by this photo at the end of our
night watch.
(see photo update)
Quentin and I have the graveyard shift now and with
so little happening it is hard to keep awake, endless hands of cards, and
working rapidly through the ships library is the order of the day (and catching
a nap in shifts). We have also not seen a boat now in 2 nights, very
surprising as I thought some of our following yachts would have caught up by now
given our lack of wind of any kind day after day.
I guess the bright side of this is that we are now
over half way and at lunch we had our halfway party with our special guest who
stowed away with us in Bermuda. The big joke when Quentin arrived with 2
huge suitcases in tow was that he had a stowaway or an inflatable companion in
one of them (turns out it was just 100 helly hanson white t-shirts to save on
washing). Luckily he managed to find a substitute inflatable in Bermuda
self inflating no less, with instructions!! For those of you able to
access the blog you can see the results on the photo update from today.
Chris felt the end product rather resembled our Wind Witch (who still seems
unable to come up with the goods)
(see photo update)
However wind is on the way according to the
forecast from yesterday, I will be downloading another today so fingers
crossed. For those following it looks like good wind in 48 hours or so
(maybe sooner) so no doubt you will be catching us soon.
Bye for now
Ben and the Crew of The Snark
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