Grumpy Old Men

Bandit
David Morgan and Brenda Webb
Thu 8 Dec 2011 16:38

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.