Day 4 & 5: The "Ocean"
Buoy 'N Sea
Phil and Trish Littman
Sat 24 Nov 2007 21:15
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25:52.9N, 73:09.6W
This was sent directly from Buoy N Sea. Still
catching up. This position was recorded at Noon on Friday, November
23rd.
Thanksgiving, Thursday November
22nd
Late Wednesday, the wind dropped off dramatically.
It went from 15 kts to 8-12kts.
Thanksgiving day started normal enough. Starbucks
coffee, oatmeal and dried fruit for breakfast.
We decided early on to try and catch a fish for
Thanksgiving. We used a lure that Steve brought, and set the line out about 3
boat lengths to troll. It hadn't be out for 15 minutes before something big hit
on the line. It just kept taking line. Steve grabbed the pole and told us to
stop the boat before the damn thing ran the whole spool out. We were under sail
and stopping got us turned the wrong way. Whatever was on our line seemed to go
straight down and got the line caught on the prop and keel. It was big, whatever
it was, but it got away in the end. Steve suspects it may have been a Wahoo. All
we were looking for was a little tuna. Subsequent attempts got us nothing but
seaweed.
During the day, winds died down to 2-5kts. This
wasn't enough for us to sail in. We had known from Herb and other forecasts that
Thursday and Friday would be calm days and that winds from the north weren't
expected. This meant that the only practical thing to do would be to motor east
as far as possible and hope for better wind. In order to motor at all, we needed
very light winds so that the waves didn't stand up and push us back. The engine
and props on sailboats are not large and do not typically handle well in big
waves.
We celebrated Thanksgiving with a couple shots of
rum each, cashew nuts, and boat horror stories with Captain Steve.
We tried plugging in the inverter. It powered on,
but the fault light went on right away. This means that there was something
wrong inside. Either a short or an incorrect voltage/amps appeared and the
protection circuitry shut it off. This wasn't a good sign.
Friday, November 23rd
Still motoring through calm seas. It looks like the
weather won't change for a few days. This will give us time to get far enough
east before we start sailing SE.
 Here's another cruise ship that was headed almost
dead on to us. Since we were motoring, they had the right of way, so we powered
down and waited for them to pass across our bow. Mind you, we're way out in the
middle of the Atlantic. We hadn't seen a boat in half a day, and this one was on
a near collision course. This is why you want to have radar and someone
always on watch. Interestingly, this looks very similar too if not identical to
Silver Shadow.
We had a greek-ish type salad for lunch. We needed
to use up the rest of the lettuce so we mixed olives, some packs of
sausage/salami wrapped with feta cheese, tuna fish, crushed red pepper,
salt & pepper and olive oil.
For dinner we had Campbell's soup with steak with
flat bread, and sardines and mussels on saltine crackers.
We see a bunch of flying fish out here. These 8
inch long fish have long wing-like fins and "fly" like sparrows on the surface
of the water when they are chased. One even jumped into our cockpit.
Back On-Line
We waited another day with a fan blowing on
the inverter but a number of tries only gave us the fault light again.
We nearly gave up the thing. Justin spent
Friday night opening the box to try and see if anything could be done. He
didn't see any water, but there had been some corrosion on a number of the
resistors. He scraped off what he could and sprayed the board with a
petroleum-based, anti-rust / anti-corrosion spray and powered it on. After
a powering it off and on a number of times, he was able to get 120VAC on the
volt meter. It was cutting in and out at first but then stayed steady. We used
it to first charge the laptop battery assure us 3 hours of laptop life. Since
the box was opened, the transistors weren't making good contact with the side of
the box, so as a precaution we set up a fan to blow on it to keep it from
overheating and burning up.
 This doesn't look like much, but its the last piece
of the puzzle in getting us back online.
Now that we have the laptop powered, we look
forward to getting caught up with the blog and getting updated weather reports
through email.
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