Dear Family and Friends,

 

25th April 2015

 

We are still carrying 11-15 kts of SE trades with us, just over 300 miles to go, Yes yes! We are nearly there! It looks finely balanced as to whether we can arrive before dark on Monday or whether we will have to lay off and anchor on Tuesday.

 

Having finally given up on the freezer which was running at full power despite failing to freeze, our power consumption has gone down and we can see that the wind generator and solar panels are doing their job and reducing our power usage. The water maker is run every 2-3 days and the generator daily. Dull but you have to think about all of this, as well as gas consumption and garbage disposal, (flattening everything to its smallest, green waste over the side and the rest in the anchor locker where we cant smell it)!

 

Success on the bread front, lovely brown loaf for lunch, but we have run out of fresh cold meats. I have to confess the tinned meat aisles of supermarkets are entirely a foreign country to me. With the possible exception of corned beef; I have a liking for homely corned beef hash with lashings of tomato ketchup, yes really, we all have our comfort foods. The rest of the offering, tinned ham and chicken, meatballs, frankfurters, meat pastes, stew, that institution Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies, (I might have had one or two of these)! I have no idea what they taste like nor unless desperate do I want to find out. Well taking advice from others I have bought these items, I could barely bring myself to check them out. But I realise that cruising these islands with no meat left I shall need to use them and indeed I am immensely grateful to our friends Anne and Jonathan who gave us a selection when they heard our freezer had packed up again before we set off for the Galapagos Islands. Well today it was a dilemma between tinned ham and pate. And it definitely said pate on the label, perhaps it means something else in Spanish. A soggy meaty mush tumbled from the tin, perhaps and I am being kind here it would have been more agreeable refrigerated. It put me in mind of Shipham’s meat pastes, does anyone still use these in sandwiches, I guess they must do. And I think Shipham’s might have the edge over this product. I can hardly wait to open more tins of meat!

 

Back to the camera manual all 200 pages of it and reorganising the photos. Do any of you use photo editing tools, my daughter recommended Light Box, any others you’ve tried tested and like?

 

All our best,

 

Lynne and Alan