Trade Winds ast last 13:12.363N 44:07.811W
Shaya Moya
Don & Susan Smyth
Sun 5 Dec 2010 16:48
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The mood on board has become more upbeat suddenly,
could the advent of the trades have had anything to do with it? Or could it be
that we nearly broke the magical 200nm a day run at 196nm, or matybe it is
because we have less than 1000nm to go. Now Tony is running a sweepstake on how
many days left 5 days or 6? I guess a sum of all of these, plus seeing
another yacht overtake us, taking two days to do so has got us fired
up.
 
We could always go that
way!!!!!!!!
What to cook? what to cook?
We have had some wonderful spinnaker runs, but
today was too hairy with the wind gusting and changing direction. Who needs it,
we are doing over 8,5kts on main and genoa alone.
Reece is the chef on duty today, and having caught
his biggest Mahi Mahi yesterday, has decided on a fish curry for tonight, washed
down with a bottle of bubbly to celebrate all of the above. Not too shabby!
I guess a lot of you are wondering what do we do
all day, how do we keep ourselves occupied? With five of us on board we have an
allocated chef of the day who provides acooked meal midday and evening, does all
the galley cleaning and washing up etc. That is a very busy day, but you get to
have the night off and can get 8 hours straight sleep.
 
Internet Dating is cool
A moments down time
For the rest of us we have a couple of 3 hour night
watches together with a 4 hour day watch to keep us busy tending sails,
adjusting course , watching out for rogue waves, other boats and anything that
might be chaffing in the rigging. This gets rid of quite a bit of time. Couple
this with doing the washing of clothes and ourselves eats up the time. Dave as
1st Mate has in addition the navigational tactics to come up with. As skipper
there seems to be a host of odd jobs that occur, from diagnosing and fixing a
hiccuping generator, to finding more space in the tender to store the garbage.
 
With great aplomb he conjures up a
meal
Thanks Gavin in New Zealand
This still leaves time for some zzz's in the
afternoon, catch up on reading, teaching Tony and Jane something each day about
running an ocean going yacht, and with the help of the Satelite email a bit of
banking. We then have to fit in blogging,
fishing, bread making, emailing, to say nothing of cleaning, vacuuming and
generally keeping theyacht ship shape, phew not enough hours in the
day!!!
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