Saturday:
Oh. My. GOODNESS. Remember that meteor shower I mentioned a couple blogs ago? Well last night, the night sky put on a show. Massive shooting stars were flying from north to south, with tails trailing for at least a few seconds after the meteor had disappeared. And they were massive too! Some of the ones spotted were as big as a thumbnail…everyone onboard spotted at least one ginormous one and were in awe of the beauty. It was truly a night to remember.
Today was a relaxed day, the wind has been kind and we’ve been able to ease everyone back into upwind sailing and the routine. No one has been sea sick as of yet and the forecast suggests the wind won’t pick up to a ridiculous speed over the next few days. Its mainly coming from the east with gusts up to 20ish knots, so 1 reef in the mina, stay sail and yankee will do us just fine.
Sunday
Maggie and I have been on mission to keep the supply of bread up, mainly to use all the rye flour we have onboard before the small break in October, but almost every night one of us has put a loaf on in the bread maker. I do love it when theres a machine to do all the hard work! And it’s definitely not a competition to see whose is tastiest either…
The wind is dying down slowly, and all the guest crew are talking about what food they’re looking forward to on land! Honestly, these landlubbers are obsessed with their pizza’s, chicken wings, steak, burgers…Hang on. Actually I think its just everyone looking forward to meat apart from me as I’m vegan! Understandable though as we haven’t caught any fish AT ALL since the Bonito during the first half of the trip. Since we got 12nm away from Palmyra, we’ve had both the fishing line and hand line out during day light hours, and theres not even been a single bite on either of them. Its very sad as we’ve been saving our two last cabbages for fish tacos which seems unlikely…
Monday
Well the wind has buggered off completely today. The engine went on this afternoon as we watched the true wind speed drop slowly from 18knots, to 8 knots. We shook a reef out the main late last night in the hopes that would keep us moving but as soon as we saw out speed below 5knots, we turned on the engine. Food is still the subject of conversation (still no fish), as is plans for after the trip. Our current ETA is Wednesday afternoon, and myself and everyone else on board cannot wait for proper shore showers! The weather has been glorious, 30 degrees Celsius tops and dropping to around 26 degrees during the night, so the fans are almost constantly on while in bed.
Martin has been having lots of fun with the Sextant on this leg. He’s been taking 3 sights a day and then waiting for Anna to help him with the complicated maths to actually figure out where we are. He says he’s really enjoying it and that Anna is a great teacher…but personally I can’t imagine actually choosing to do maths in your own free time is particularly fun (maybe thats just me though! 😉 )