Location: 14 40.34N, 54 24.41W

 

Today:  Theory of Relativity; Rolling on; Where has all the seaweed gone?;   If at first you succeed, try try again;

 

Greetings! We hope that this finds you well. One more day and it will be our third TGIF while at sea—I bet you are anxiously awaiting what clever combination of words we will find to fit.  Us too. But, we get ahead of ourselves. For those faithful readers who have been reading the Mailasail Blog, we hope that you have now found the past blogs and somehow figured out how to get them back in order. Sorry about that.

 

We have had another relaxing day with the wind gods still punishing us for thinking the good times (winds) would roll on until we arrived in St Lucia. For our transgressions we have enjoyed winds that ranged between 9 and 15 knots with the majority around 10knots.  At these levels, Izzy is guilty of losing her concentration and letting herself wander all over the front of the boat with the result that we are averaging around 5 knots. We also passed another milestone—the 400 miles to go barrier, but, with our boat speed down, our date of arrival has remained somewhere around mid Sunday.  The skies have been clear and there is increasing signs of life around us- we have spotted a 120 foot sailboat (not on the ARC) and a freighter which go within 2 nm of us—a near miss in battleships.  At lunch we were drowing our sorrows in yet another glass of water—and some bright spark said, “when we first started, weren’t we happy to get as high as 5 knots?”. Out of the mouths of babes comes truth—I am not saying which one of us is the baby, but, it did remind us that we have been somewhat spoiled with the last 5 – 6 days when we were easily averaging 6 knot or better. Suitably chastised, we really like it when we go 5 knots (but, even better when go faster ).

 

One of the surprises for us so far on this trip has been the relatively small size of the “rollers”. For those of you that followed our route from Gibraltar to to Las Palmas,  our on-board educator shared with us her view on the construction of waves:  the really big ones are the rollers that are those waves that have built uninterrupted over 100’s of miles and they can be VERY big, but, manageable if there is a time between them; the next layer is the wind waves, which, funny enough are caused by the local winds and then the icing on the cake are the ripples...not sure what causes them, but, they are typically smaller and can go in any direction that they want. During the trip from Gib, we encountered rollers that were  2- 3 meters, but, had very little wind or ripples and they were nicely spaced so that the ride was quite comfortable. So far in this trip we have really had small rollers, but, more active wind and ripples which create the confused seas (and helmsperson). Well, today we have started to see some nice big rollers— 3 – 4 meters and nicely spaced. Unfortunately, the wind and ripples are not giving up easily so the overall effect continues to be confusion.  We are, though, happy to see the rollers back in town.

 

We have had a constant companion over the last...600 (or more) miles, the floating seaweed. Not exactly the fisherman’s best friend as Bill would attest, but, it is interesting none the less. Where does it come from? Where is it going? are some of the questions we have been asking ourselves- no surprise there as we are the only ones on the boat.  There is speculation that the flying fish will lay eggs on the seaweed, but, no one knows for sure. Certainly a big mystery I would hope you agree dear Reader. Well, today- we lost the seaweed about mid day. It has to be said that it was looking a little yellower than normal and so maybe this is the end of the road for our floating friends. Then again, we may well be surrounded by it tomorrow morning. Bill was very happy to see it go.

 

Speaking of Bill, he has continued to set hooks and line every day since the second day of our crossing. Encouraged by the early successful and tasty catches, he has tried to replicate that same success. Each day, he tries a different set up, include very recently recycling a flying fish that had decided to spend some time in the lanai, but, forgot it can’t live for long out of water. Each day, it seems that something has hit his lure and each day he seems to be replacing the pieces that have been taken away. So the good news is that there are fish out there to be caught, the bad news is we need more time to figure out how! 

 

Apologies, I have to step away- it is Jane’s day to happy hour and my day to cook dinner. We are going to team up- happy hour will iberico ham and quesadias and tonic.  For dinner we are having salmon fried, wild rice and a salad of sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers.     

 

We won’t be long, grab another coffee/tea and talk amongst yourselves.

Back again, Happy hour was well received as was the dinner... so happy tummies again. Forgot to mention dessert: Jane made up a dish with diced pear, mint together with little meringues. Very tasty as well.

 

The good news about cooking dinner is that someone else gets to clean up. Then bad news is that you are straight on to your next watch at 19:00. As it gets dark here very early and because of this watch pattern we have been eating pretty early- 17:00 for Happy Hour and then dinner around 18:30. No sooner had we sat down to eat our dinner when the first of what seemed like a line of squalls started to make their ‘approaches to Libeccio.  We did change course and were able to avoid them, but, it was a rather tense 90 mins.  No prize for guessing who was on watch at this time—yes, it was Mike. To make matters worse, since i took over the watch at 19:00, we really haven’t had a squall to worry about. This is doing nothing to dispel Mike’s fixation that the squalls are out to get him.

 

Its dark here now, I better go pay attention to the radar and AIS receivers, the wind has returned (around 17 knot), we are surfing down some of the bigger rollers and there are squalls lurking for the unattentive. 

 

Take care,

 

 

 

The Crew of Libeccio