wet cabin ! 20:42.27N 30:29.3136W

Hello, sorry for lack of blog yesterday, things got a
bit on the interesting side! Firstly we hope you can now se our position on the map
above the blogs on this mailasail blog site, many thanks to Graham for sorting
that for us. Yesterday morning we felt like we had had a good night
with out falling asleep while rowing and we felt we had made good progress
however on receiving the position of us in relation to the other boats it was
clear that they were making better progress than us-very annoying. About midday
we were heading just South of West with a following wind and the waves going the
same direction us but we just didn’t seem to be moving. When we were not
rowing we were moving at about 1.3 knots and with us rowing as hard as we could
we were really struggling to get 2knots. This was very frustrating and we could
not work out why. We checked to see if anything was stuck around the rudder and
even jumped into the water in quite big swells (tied on to the boat) to see if
there was anything stuck to the underside slowing us but again there was not.
We figured that we must be in some strange ocean current or something as a very
frustrating hour we started to move normally again. In the afternoon I (Jim) was in the cabin and Paul was
rowing, I had the tiny hatch at the back of the cabin open a little to let some
air in when Paul said he saw two waves come from 90degrees apart and meet right
behind the boat. The resulting huge wave came right over the cabin and landed
on the deck! Luckily Paul managed to shout ‘SHUT THE HATCH’ so I
had grabbed the handles of the hatch when the wave hit but not managed to
secure it. About 40L of salt water managed to get into the cabin soaking
everything in our normally damp but dry living quarters. If Paul had not
shouted and I had not been holding onto the handles I think that we would have
had a foot of water in the cabin rather that an inch or two. Today (Sunday) who
ever is not rowing will be washer woman trying to rinse the salt out of all our
wet clothes, sleeping sheets etc as last night was very uncomfortable sleeping
on one wet roll mat with no sheet or pillow. |