I would sail 1000 miles (and I would sail 1900 more)
Yacht Ariel
Henry Adams
Tue 4 Dec 2007 14:18
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Position 19:27N, 30:58W
Well,
Here we are 1000 miles in and rather committed to
this whole venture it would now seem. We've had a good couple of days
distance-wise, which is always likely to increase spirits, and I have now
guestimated that we should be into Rodney Bay Marina in a mere 15 days or so -
no time at all, especially not now that we have an advent calendar.
I feel I should explain: we opened our 1000
mile care package from Henry's mum today (2000 mile package from my mum to
follow - a lot to live up to) and found all sorts of goodies thereenclosed.
Quite apart from all the sweets which I am going to allow to do their best in
attacking my teeth, there was a little bottle of champagne, countless biscuits
and cakes, puzzle books (which are great as they mean I have to espend even less
effort on conversation than normal) and even a mini bottle of champagne!
Most exciting though were the mini sparklers (coming out later) and the advent
calendar, to get us into the Christmas spirit.
Aforementioned Christmas spirit has been a little
hard to come by, not due to my inherently humbug nature, but to the fact that we
have officially been in the tropics for about 4 days and have been enjoying the
rather un-Christmasy temperatures - hope it's this warm back home.
Are expecting some rather strong winds (up to force
6) in the next couple of days, so we'll try and break the 140-miles-in-a-day
mark, under just a double-reefed main - bring it on. This should also help with
our fishing, which apparently requires speeds of around 7 knots for optimal
results. I would, young grasshopper though I am, hasten to contradict this
expert opinion and point the learned gentleman to our first experience of deep
sea fishing 3 days agao, when we caught a 12 pound dorado after 3 minutes,
without actually having paid the full line out. At this stage the evil skipper
was very popular and boastfully asserted that he would maintain his record of 4
pounds of fish for every minute expended in the effort. His popularity has since
waned with no further fish despite an entire afternoon dedicated to the pursuit
of our piscine co-inhabitors of the ocean (although, excitingly, a flying fish
did land on dexk last night).
Not much more as power at a premium and need to get
some more detailed weather, but will try to update soon and love to all until
that time,
Foshy/The Crew (and Henry/The Evil Skipper, even
though he had nothing to do with the writing of this)
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