20:55N 20:12W
For those of you reading for the first
time…..you may wonder why we head each blog with a movie title (please tell us
you’d noticed!). Well, when you are
at sea for days on end it’s a little hard to come up with something other than
Monday, Tuesday, Day One, Two etc in the subject line….so we opted to be a
little different. And to be
completely honest we stole the idea from Serafin’s blog – although they used
song titles. It gives us something cerebral to do each day (other than the
Sudoku) and we’ve been known to spend quite some time searching our memory banks
for appropriate titles. No google
out here so we have to rely on what’s in the sock drawer and, as a sometime
movie critic in a previous life; I’ve managed to come up with a few.
.
So, Grumpy Old Men? Well those of you who know David will
know he rarely, if ever, gets grumpy.
Overall he’s incredibly even tempered with a wonderful easy going
disposition. In fact sometimes I
despair as, being the ever enquiring journalist, I feel like a jolly good
argument but it just doesn’t work with him. So I could never really call him a
grumpy old man……until today.
In yesterday’s blog he told you about
William the Worm – our new generator that is towed on a length of rope behind
Bandit. With Bandit zooming along
at 7-8knots Willy’s spinning propeller is doing a fantastic job of generating
plenty of power but he’s mucking up our fishing! It’s too risky to have a line
out as well for obvious reasons.
Every morning on our SSB radio check in
we hear more reports of fish being caught (mostly by the Kiwi contingent out
there crossing I might add). So
while I was having my morning nap David decided it really was possible to fish
and generate power at the same time.
Now this is where it gets really, really messy so I won’t go into too
much detail other than to say I was suddenly launched out of my reverie and told
to slow Bandit down (actually……it wasn’t as mild mannered as that….there was a
reasonable amount of urgency in his voice and I think a swear word or six). So, taking over from Zak (our trusty
autohelm) I quickly turned into wind and luckily, the flogging of the headsail
saved me from most of the verbal action at the back of the
boat.
So….as I write this, the skipper (a
very, very grumpy old man) is
sitting outside desperately trying to unravel metres of nylon fishing line from
Willy’s rope and propeller.
Hmmm..he could be there for some time. I think he will eventually see the funny
side.
Meanwhile we are continuing to make
fantastic progress, rocketing along right now at 7 knots with 15 knots of wind just forward of the
beam and looking good to make landfall on Saturday. Thanks again to Team Balvenie (Mark and
Amanda) for the fantastic weather updates and advice on the morning net.
PS. We are having a bit of computer
trouble so if we don’t blog tomorrow DON’T PANIC.
