Christmas Greetings
Panatlantic
Tue 25 Dec 2007 19:14
|
Merry Christmas to you all!
I hope this finds you all snug and warm, next to a
warm fire or radiator, fill to bursting point with turkey and trimmings and
supping on some soul-warming beverage, all the while basking in the
love of your friends and relatives. That's how i tend to spend my Christmas
evenings!
On Christmas Day last year i climbed to the
snow-smattered summit of Skafell Pike, England's loftiest hillock, from which i
called James to talk about how different things would be 'this time next year.'
James was drunk near to blindness and could barely communicate with me, as i
gazed out over the river of cloud flowing between the Lake District's highest
peaks, but agreed that yes, things would be mighty different!
And how they are!
This morning saw us in our normal routine, coming
off the night shifts after making steady ground towards our waypoint. I rowed
the dawn shift, watching the sun rise into a near cloudless sky. Whisps of
Cirrus in the southern sky foretold of a change in weather, a body of low
pressure moving northwards towards us that will bring with it fine tail-winds
some time in the next 24 hours (as low pressure systems rotate anticlockwise in
the Northern Hemisphere), an auspicious start to any day! Upon reflection
however, these systems also tend to bring with them a great deal of
precipitation, so perhaps not such an auspicious start afterall!
We must have accidentally kept our vent open during
the night, for we had a few surprises for us once the sleep had worked its way
out of our eyes: Santa Claus had been to visit! He climbed down our little air
vent and brought with him some wonderful gifts, not least of which a solar
shower and rubber ring from my 12 days of Christmas wish list! I suspect that
Rachel might have suggested to Santa that this would be most appreciated, and
indeed they are, i am now cleaner than i have been in some months having just
had a lovely shower on deck!
We both received wonderful letters and gifts from
our families back home in England, and decided to tuck in to some breakfast.
Upon arriving in La Gomera we discovered that we were missing several boxes of
food that had been mislaid by the couriers/nabbed by the Spanish customs, which
means that we had to supplement our (just about edible) Expedition Foods main
meals with (dog food tasts better) Raven Organic Dehydrated Meals, containing no
artificial flavourings, hence the flavour. Each morning we battle to extract 2
food bags from our hatches and await the Russian Roulette of what is inside:
Curry gets a cheer, everything else is greeted with disappointment apart from
the Raven food that induces tears. This morning i randomly selected 2 bags of
food and eagerly opened them up, full of the joys of the day. Out came the most
sorry sight to greet any weary traveller, 8 bags of Raven food: "Not today",
said James, throwing them over board, and he went and found something more
edible!
We've been receiving emails telling us that some of
the other rowers have been hallucinating! I can safely report that we have
suffered so such problems, me and Big Bob keep a good look out for any strange
happenings every day and night and we haven't seen anything out of the ordinary,
have we Big Bob?
Big Bob says "No my lordship."
The meteors did look quite surreal, one can see how
Cletus and Bobby-Joe out in Idaho might mistake such astronomical phenomenae for
UFOs, all that remains is to answer how and why all of them end up being
probed?
I was highly surprised to see an elephant riding
towards me on a unicycle last night too, but Big Bob told me that it was just
Jamima Puddle-Trunk on the look out for peanuts, we didn't have any on board so
she trumpeted at us and pedalled away playing her occarina to look for some up
North. "She's very dextrous for an elephant", i thought, for she didn't miss a
note on her occarina.
The rowing is often very challenging, it
might come as a surprise to most of you that the Atlantic is a great deal
more wavy than i had imagined, but at times it can be sublime. The nights
particularly lend themselves to wonder, especially now that we are
accustomed to the shifts and don't suffer so much from fatigue. We both tend to
listen to music but just every now and then i leave the MP3 player off in order
to row placidly amid the noise and the haste of the waves that crash around
me, and remember what peace there may be in silence, for it is rare that i will
find such moments again in my life to enjoy such wonderful isolation from
everything else in the world, and i am careful to savour the experience while i
can.
Right then good people, i shall leave you there
with an offering of my warmest regards for the festive season, enjoy the rest of
your evening,
Love Niall and Big Bob
|