Arc Day 3 - Introducing the Cast
Tucanon
Dick and Irene Craig
Thu 26 Nov 2009 09:44
For those that became aware of them through the ARC Day 2 blog, I will provide a background.
Girl bear, in oatmeal RNLI sweater and Boy bear, in blue RNLI sweater, have been sailing with us since we left the shores of the UK, April 5th, 2002, on our fly-bridge, motor cruiser.
They were very put out when Snow bear joined us, on our Lagoon 440 sailing catamaran, May 2007, and used his lack of nautical experience as an excuse not to welcome him aboard.
La-la is a small, black, rubber or plastic, girl doll who hatched out of a Kinder egg. She also joined us at the same time as Snow bear.
Jake, the parrot, came aboard in April 2008. He was a gift from a lovely lady who was joining us for the EMYR (East Mediterranean Yacht rally). We didn't know Caroline when she joined us, to participate in the EMYR but she stayed with us for about 10 weeks and we all had great fun. She also joined us for six weeks sailing, May, this year.
All the "babies" are now great mates and definitely a part of the family.
This morning, Austin kindly took all six black, plastic, vegetable baskets from the lockers in the cockpit, so that I could check the condition of the fruit and vegetables we loaded on board two days before departure from Las Palmas.
The first thing we had to deal with was protecting the baskets from the water which had managed to get into the lockers when the waves were big. Only two baskets were effected but we provided protection for all of them.
Only one orange had to be discarded, everything else was fine, though I did move a red pepper and two green peppers to the fridge in the galley.
One of the granny smith apples had started to rot so I cut out the dodgey bit, added a couple more apples and made an apple crumble for pud tonight.
Austin put out the fishing line and if he catches anything we will BBQ it tonight, otherwise we will BBQ some sausages.See Photo "Austin fishing".
We usually eat salad at lunchtime, followed by fresh fruit salad but we had a respite from the salad for two days while we found our sea legs. Lunch today was tuna salad with freshly made wholemeal bread. Life wouldn't be the same without the breadmaker.
Chris is kept busy trying to make some sort of order from all the files on our laptop. It is inundated with so much stuff that it no longer performs as it should.
We replaced the mainsail and the genoa with the parasailor this morning and are now just bobbing along. The speed just displayed on the Raymarine equipment showed 10.6knots. The wind is now only reaching the early 20's and the swell is negligible. A very comfortable ride.
We changed the clocks today and put the time back an hour.
I came on watch at 13.30 but after an hour, the time on the clock displayed not 14.30 but 13.30.
We compromised and split the additional time in half, my watch doing 50% of the additional time and the next watch doing the other 50%.
About 13.30(the first one), we spotted a large ketch just ahead of us, a couple of miles to starboard. We had hoped that it might be another ARC boat but we were unable to identify it and it eventually crossed our bows, heading in the direction of Africa, about 200nautical miles away.
As we didn't catch a fish today, we had to have the sausages barbecued, after all, see photo "Chris at BBQ".
Irene
