09/05/15
Day 29
Today was actually exciting for a change! I was trying to pull up some water to do the dishes with this afternoon when I looked down to find a huge fish swimming alongside us. It was unmistakably a Mahi Mahi, with a bright blue body and fluorescent yellow tail. Soon after his mate appeared, and the two of them just swam alongside us for hours. They weren't the biggest Mahi Mahi we've seen, but even the smaller one was at least 1m long.
We'd had the line trailing behind us all day with no luck. So Garth grabbed the rod and sat up on the bow, pulling our little squiddy lure along right in front of their noses. They lazily went for it a few times, but didn't commit to biting down on the hook. As Garth was sitting up on our dinghy in the sunshine with spray flying all around him and these two huge fish swimming alongside us, a massive school of flying fish appeared just in front of the boat and all jumped out of the water across our bow in one big group. It was pretty amazing just being out on the ocean in amongst all the action today. It reminded me how magnificent the world can be and how normal people don't really get to experience things like this.
As much fun as it is watching big schools of flying fish burst out of the water, they're probably why we ate tinned tuna for dinner again today. Our Mahi Mahi friends just weren't particularly hungry. They probably knew we didn't have a spear gun and were taunting us by swimming close enough for us to reach out and touch them. We haven't caught a single fish since we were in Australia, and it's getting ridiculous. Though after watching them swim next to us for a while I was kind of glad that they didn't want to be caught. They were just so beautiful flying along next to us, getting bored and swimming ahead when we went too slow and then coming back to us when we sped up again. They reminded me so much of dolphins, just wanting to hang out and play with us. I wonder if this friendly nature is why they're referred to as dolphin fish.
I'm not sure I would have felt too great about snatching one of them out of the water to leave it's mate all alone either. They swam together all day and were obviously a pair. Garth assured me that little fishy brains can't handle the concept of loss or sadness and that if we caught one the other would just go and find another fish to mate with. But it would still feel wrong. I'm hoping that this means we're getting closer to the normal route people take across this stretch of ocean though, which should be nicer than the bizarre upwind route we've been following. We were told that all you had to do to catch a fish here was hold out a net, so being followed by Mahi Mahi is definitely reassuring.
So that was the excitement for today. We really needed some excitement too, because the days are really dragging on. We eat, sleep, read and pick up the dead flying fish that decide to commit suicide on our deck daily. The sea has been horrible lately, with chaotic little waves everywhere. For a while the wind was coming from every direction as clouds all around us sucked up the air and got the wind all confused, messing up the waves. The wind should swing around further to the south in the next few days and we're both crossing our fingers that the weather forecast is actually right for once. I would absolutely love to stop sailing so tight to the wind for a while. I miss the days when everything was calm and we could bake bread and eat pizza and chocolate pudding for dinner.
I feel like we're nearing the end of the trip. Which is dangerous because we're at least 15 days away, though it's probably closer to 20. 1800 miles to go. As soon as I start counting days the end gets near and I start getting restless. Usually this happens when we're days out, not weeks. Realistically the rest of this passage will probably take longer than the total length all of our previous passages. Damn all these islands being so close together. I've been thoroughly spoiled when it comes to long passages.
Nothing else has broken yet. Though the fix Garth put on the boomvang didn't work for long, and we've lost a bit of diesel. No matter how tight we tie things down all this jerking around and bouncing up and down keeps dislodging everything. The diesel cans keep escaping from their rope prisons and tipping over. We're getting hit with so much water and rocking about so much that every time Garth manages to get them secure they get pummelled by waves again and the ropes break from the sheer pressure of being hit by so much water. Fun fact: the cheap jerry cans I bought in Fiji slowly leak diesel if you leave them on their sides for too long. Luckily we're still passing through squalls fairly often, so the rain should get rid of the smell eventually.
We changed time zones yesterday. It's a bit strange changing the time just because we feel like it. We've got nothing to base it on other than the fact that the sun seems to be coming up and going down earlier than before. It made sense when we went past Pitcairn and Easter Islands to switch to their times but we're not near anything now. Time is such a strange concept. We live by a 24 hour cycle of three hour shifts, so why bother changing it at all? It's not like we have to get to the shops before they close, or catch the news on TV. But for some reason we just can't deal with the idea of the sun coming up at 2am. Plus it's comforting to know that we're getting closer to the right time zone for Panama.
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11/05/15
Day 31
This is the worst. The sea state just gets more horrible every day. Today we're bouncing up and down as the bow climbs straight over all the short, steep waves in front of us and then dips straight back down over the other side. It's like being on one of those electronic bulls that serve no other purpose other than to throw you off. At the same time we're being tipped sideways as big waves hit our windward side, occasionally crashing on top of us and filling the cockpit with water. The resulting mess is like being on some kind of crazy fairground ride. Except we can't get off. Repeatedly yelling for somebody to shut it down doesn't do anything either. We can't really stand up or move around without being flung around the cabin and the fact that we're only going 3 knots just rubs salt into the wound.
It was a little bit nicer yesterday though, which was a welcome change. We even managed to catch a fish! It's our first fish since Australia and it wasn't even big enough to bother keeping. We didn't even hear the rod tick out when we caught it because it was too small. Garth just happened to test the line before dark to find that we had a baby Mahi Mahi on the hook. We pulled him on board, so even though we threw him back I'm adamant that it counts. We could have eaten him but at about 40cm he wasn't even half grown, so we figured it was better to let him have a bit of fun reproducing before sentencing him to the dinner table. I'm not sure it's even worth the effort to try and fillet a smaller fish when the sea is this messy, because it would be more of a waste if we didn't get all the meat. And filleting it perfectly is almost impossible when we're being thrown all over the place. Garth would have probably ended up chopping his hand off. I can't help but wonder if that's how we keep losing our lures, by catching a small fish that eventually gets nabbed by something much bigger.
I found a boat yesterday. It's the second one we've come across in the last week and it was pretty exciting to have a reminder that we're not all alone out here. Both finds were just on the AIS without getting a visual, because they passed behind us about 20 miles away. The first one was headed to Chile and the second to Argentina. We have yet to see anything else out on the ocean since leaving Tahiti months ago, but I'm sure we'll get our fill of traffic once we get near Panama.
There's not much else to say. We're stuck indoors again because it's such a splashy mess outside. Today I slept, ate, watched a movie, slept some more and read a book, all amidst constant praying to the sea gods to just let us be comfortable for a while. I'll wake up in the morning and do it all again. Different book, different movie, but other than that it often feels like groundhog day out here.
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17/05/15
Day 37
It's finally nice again! Well, bearable at least. We're still getting thrown about a bit but I can finally sit in the cockpit again for the first time since just after we left the Gambier. It took 37 days, but we've finally gone far enough east to be able to turn downwind a bit and head further north. Plus the wind has shifted a bit further south, the waves are a lot calmer and the squalls that kept messing up the wind direction have all dispersed and headed off to make somebody else's life miserable.
A few days ago though I was going absolutely mad. The waves were all small and horrible, so we were bunny hopping over them like the boat was some kind of demented pogo stick. We would go flying over them and crash down with that sickening smack that I've come to know and hate. From inside it was easy to picture us flying through the air as we launched off the top of each wave, though realistically I'm sure the majority of the boat was still in the water. I have a really hard time sleeping whem I'm frightened though. Usually in bad weather I'm a messy high-strung ball of nerves, but it's not the weather that I'm scared of. I'm scared about everything breaking. Probably because everything always breaks. Lying under the blankets in my bed I can picture the gas tanks coming untied and flying overboard, the sails getting expensive rips in them, the jerry cans falling off... Things that won't kill us but will cost a lot to fix and leave us in a pickle if they actually happen. This time it was the dinghy I was worried about. The boat was coming down so quickly and with so much force, I could actually hear the dinghy becoming airborne. It's not secured very well because there's a rope going through the hole in the centreboard case which is attached to the deck. It can't go far and it's stuck in place. But every time the boat hit the water I would picture that rope breaking and the dinghy getting lost at sea. So that made for a few days of restless sleep. I know the boat is strong, but if you hit something with a hammer enough times it will eventually break into pieces. Which is the thought that woke me up every 10 minutes or so the other night, every time we hit the water hard enough to make me feel like we were living inside a jackhammer.
So thank goodness that's over. The only thing that kept me from completely losing it was the knowledge that no matter how horrible things get, time doesn't stop. It keeps going. So even though every minute feels like an eternity of torture, time will keep ticking away and we will keep getting closer to our destination. Which is kind of obvious. But I guess when everything is horrible it makes life easier to know that it will evetually end.
So now I'm sitting under the stars again. Today I actually got to lie out here surrounded by numerous shades of blue and sunshine. Which was amazing. We even managed to put the lure out again and we actually caught a fish! It was a small Mahi Mahi, but this one was big enough to eat. And it was insanely delicious. Now at least we can say we've caught a fish in the South Pacific. Garth's dad caught a few while he was with us, and we got something off the coast of Australia. But since then we've had nothing. We haven't been fishing much on this trip, which sounds ridiculous but has been unavoidable. Since we left the Gambiers we've had the line out every day that fishing was a feasable option and that's probably been less than 7 days all up. The waves have just been so rough that even if we'd caught something there's no way we'd have been able to get it on board and fillet it. Opening a tin and tipping it into a pot without flying all over the boat or losing it on the floor has been hard enough for chef Garth to handle.
We've started to see birds again. I hadn't noticed that they'd been missing, but when they started circling us a few days ago I realised we hadn't seen any since leaving the Gambier. Maybe this part of the world is just so rough and horrible that they couldn't be bothered venturing down here. But they're back! When you spend all day staring at sky, water and waves anything to break up the monotomy is a relief.
Yesterday kind of sucked. We got to open this weeks package of food, which Garth had stored under the stairs with next weeks bag because when we left we couldn't move for all the food stacked up everywhere. So he went to get them out and when he opened the cupboard we were blasted with the stench of rotten milk. Something must have moved around and popped a carton of milk, which had been sitting there for the entire trip getting more and more disgusting. The cupboard is right next to my bed and at the beginning of the trip I had mentioned that something smelled off. I looked everywhere but found nothing and assumed it was an old empty milk carton that had escaped the rubbish, which also lives behind the stairs. So after coating everything else in the bag and then spreading itself all over the container holding our food, the milk had just been left to fester for all this time. So. Gross. We spent an hour or so trying not to vomit as we cleaned off everything in the bag, which then got left out in the sun to dry off. The smell is almost gone today. However, we did have to make up a big batch of pasta sauce with the two packets of salami that got left in the sun to cook. And they really cooked. When I picked them up I nearly dropped them again they were that hot.
There's a lot of phosphorescence in the water here and it's really beautiful. It's always nice to look down and see sparkly dots in the darkness. I've been sitting out here just staring down at the water and watching the glowing wake spread out from the boat then slowly get darker again. Then the waves by the boat light up and the process repeats. It's mesmorising. I wish the dolphins would come back now that the water is all sparkly.
Before we left, I told Garth that the winches needed to be serviced. I gave him the option of cleaning the boat or servicing winches and he took the winches while I finished the cleaning. I didn't actually see him pull anything apart, but he swears he did it. Last time I serviced them it took me most of the day, but he seemed to be done in no time at all. I can't help but feel that if he'd done it properly he would have come inside asking for springs, rags or grease at some stage. He also would have made a massive mess of the cockpit which I would have had to re-clean. But he did it suspiciously quickly and I didn't see any evidence of the alleged maintenance even though he swore black and blue that he did all of them. On an unrelated note, the second speed on our one good winch for the port side is no longer working. To be fair, it's been under a lot of strain over a long period of time because that's the side our sails have been on for almost the entire trip. We've used it a lot from furling and un-furling and furling and un-furling as squalls constantly passed by. Even so, I find the fact that it no longer works so soon after it was "serviced" suspicious. Though I really should have smelled a rat when he failed to make a mess. If you follow the trail of destruction, you'll usually find Garth sitting in a pile of dirt at the end.
Now that the sea has calmed down we're moving a lot faster without having to bounce over the top of all the waves. We're averaging 4 or 5 knots now, but we got up to 7 yesterday when the wind picked up. Yay! We're about 11 days away if we can keep going at 4 knots, or 9 days if we go 5 knots. It's crazy what a difference 1 knot can make over time. Either way we're probably looking at another 264 hours. Not that I'm counting.
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19/05/15
Day 39
Just 855 miles to go! That's 8 more days at the very least. Probably more like 10, seeing as the wind is supposed to die down as we get further north. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd be counting 10 more days of sailing as 'nearly there.' But here we are.
I'm sitting under a moonless sky tonight, with nothing but a scattering of stars to light up the darkness. Two birds have decided to join me and they're kind of freaking me out. They've been circling the boat for hours making clicking sounds. Occasionally some light falls on one of them, showing the great expanse of their wings. But for the most part they move silently through the night before sneaking over to a previously unoccupied patch of sky and making a scary noise. I feel like I'm being tracked by wild animals in the dark and I have no idea where they're going to jump out from.
Yesterday the sea got all bouncy again. The waves went back to being short and steep like before, with one important difference - we're no longer heading into them. The wind has finally shifted to the SE and we've finally started heading further north, which means we're almost downwind. It's lovely. We definitely noticed when the waves change though, as the boat started rocking back and forth and kept doing so all day long. It was too rocky to do the dishes and made cooking a lot harder for Garth, but the day was simply a bit uncomfortable instead of the crippling, unbearable horror of upwind sailing we've experienced for a lot of this passage.
I was just in the process of writing 'today was lovely' when a rogue wave splashed over the side and got water all over me and my tablet. I guess I can't win. For the most part it really was quite nice though. Garth left me to sleep in this morning and then I lazed around reading all day. It was too rough to try fishing yesterday, but we trawled a line all day today. The fish were fighting over the hook! We caught three Mahi Mahi over the course of the day, all of which were thrown back because they were too small to bother with at around 40 - 45 cm long. We lost our bigger lure at the beginning of the passage, so this must be the size of fish we're going to keep catching with this smaller one. All of our squid lures are around the same size, so our chances of landing something bigger don't look promising. We've tied a chunk of rope onto the lure which will hopefully churn up the water a bit more and beef up our squid to look more appetizing to bigger fish. I think tomorrow we'll stick out one of our bigger diving lures as well in the hopes that something yummy will go for it. I don't think it's a coincidence that we're just starting to catch fish now that we're going further downwind. We probably weren't going fast enough before. So I'm going to actively fish tomorrow by keeping a keen eye on both the lines all day. If we catch another small Mahi Mahi we'll probably keep it, even though rough filleting on the floor of a moving cockpit won't produce a lot of meat.
We're just 200 miles off the coast of South America, so we're expecting to run into some boats soon. Hopefully not literally. As Garth was drifting off to sleep tonight he piped up with "if I kited to shore from here it would only take 10 hours." It figures that's what he's thinking about in his sleep. Whilst it's kind of interesting, it's also a disappointing reminder of how slow this method of transportation is. It would take us at least 48 hours to sail there at a decent speed.
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Day 29
Today was actually exciting for a change! I was trying to pull up some water to do the dishes with this afternoon when I looked down to find a huge fish swimming alongside us. It was unmistakably a Mahi Mahi, with a bright blue body and fluorescent yellow tail. Soon after his mate appeared, and the two of them just swam alongside us for hours. They weren't the biggest Mahi Mahi we've seen, but even the smaller one was at least 1m long.
We'd had the line trailing behind us all day with no luck. So Garth grabbed the rod and sat up on the bow, pulling our little squiddy lure along right in front of their noses. They lazily went for it a few times, but didn't commit to biting down on the hook. As Garth was sitting up on our dinghy in the sunshine with spray flying all around him and these two huge fish swimming alongside us, a massive school of flying fish appeared just in front of the boat and all jumped out of the water across our bow in one big group. It was pretty amazing just being out on the ocean in amongst all the action today. It reminded me how magnificent the world can be and how normal people don't really get to experience things like this.
As much fun as it is watching big schools of flying fish burst out of the water, they're probably why we ate tinned tuna for dinner again today. Our Mahi Mahi friends just weren't particularly hungry. They probably knew we didn't have a spear gun and were taunting us by swimming close enough for us to reach out and touch them. We haven't caught a single fish since we were in Australia, and it's getting ridiculous. Though after watching them swim next to us for a while I was kind of glad that they didn't want to be caught. They were just so beautiful flying along next to us, getting bored and swimming ahead when we went too slow and then coming back to us when we sped up again. They reminded me so much of dolphins, just wanting to hang out and play with us. I wonder if this friendly nature is why they're referred to as dolphin fish.
I'm not sure I would have felt too great about snatching one of them out of the water to leave it's mate all alone either. They swam together all day and were obviously a pair. Garth assured me that little fishy brains can't handle the concept of loss or sadness and that if we caught one the other would just go and find another fish to mate with. But it would still feel wrong. I'm hoping that this means we're getting closer to the normal route people take across this stretch of ocean though, which should be nicer than the bizarre upwind route we've been following. We were told that all you had to do to catch a fish here was hold out a net, so being followed by Mahi Mahi is definitely reassuring.
So that was the excitement for today. We really needed some excitement too, because the days are really dragging on. We eat, sleep, read and pick up the dead flying fish that decide to commit suicide on our deck daily. The sea has been horrible lately, with chaotic little waves everywhere. For a while the wind was coming from every direction as clouds all around us sucked up the air and got the wind all confused, messing up the waves. The wind should swing around further to the south in the next few days and we're both crossing our fingers that the weather forecast is actually right for once. I would absolutely love to stop sailing so tight to the wind for a while. I miss the days when everything was calm and we could bake bread and eat pizza and chocolate pudding for dinner.
I feel like we're nearing the end of the trip. Which is dangerous because we're at least 15 days away, though it's probably closer to 20. 1800 miles to go. As soon as I start counting days the end gets near and I start getting restless. Usually this happens when we're days out, not weeks. Realistically the rest of this passage will probably take longer than the total length all of our previous passages. Damn all these islands being so close together. I've been thoroughly spoiled when it comes to long passages.
Nothing else has broken yet. Though the fix Garth put on the boomvang didn't work for long, and we've lost a bit of diesel. No matter how tight we tie things down all this jerking around and bouncing up and down keeps dislodging everything. The diesel cans keep escaping from their rope prisons and tipping over. We're getting hit with so much water and rocking about so much that every time Garth manages to get them secure they get pummelled by waves again and the ropes break from the sheer pressure of being hit by so much water. Fun fact: the cheap jerry cans I bought in Fiji slowly leak diesel if you leave them on their sides for too long. Luckily we're still passing through squalls fairly often, so the rain should get rid of the smell eventually.
We changed time zones yesterday. It's a bit strange changing the time just because we feel like it. We've got nothing to base it on other than the fact that the sun seems to be coming up and going down earlier than before. It made sense when we went past Pitcairn and Easter Islands to switch to their times but we're not near anything now. Time is such a strange concept. We live by a 24 hour cycle of three hour shifts, so why bother changing it at all? It's not like we have to get to the shops before they close, or catch the news on TV. But for some reason we just can't deal with the idea of the sun coming up at 2am. Plus it's comforting to know that we're getting closer to the right time zone for Panama.
11/05/15
Day 31
This is the worst. The sea state just gets more horrible every day. Today we're bouncing up and down as the bow climbs straight over all the short, steep waves in front of us and then dips straight back down over the other side. It's like being on one of those electronic bulls that serve no other purpose other than to throw you off. At the same time we're being tipped sideways as big waves hit our windward side, occasionally crashing on top of us and filling the cockpit with water. The resulting mess is like being on some kind of crazy fairground ride. Except we can't get off. Repeatedly yelling for somebody to shut it down doesn't do anything either. We can't really stand up or move around without being flung around the cabin and the fact that we're only going 3 knots just rubs salt into the wound.
It was a little bit nicer yesterday though, which was a welcome change. We even managed to catch a fish! It's our first fish since Australia and it wasn't even big enough to bother keeping. We didn't even hear the rod tick out when we caught it because it was too small. Garth just happened to test the line before dark to find that we had a baby Mahi Mahi on the hook. We pulled him on board, so even though we threw him back I'm adamant that it counts. We could have eaten him but at about 40cm he wasn't even half grown, so we figured it was better to let him have a bit of fun reproducing before sentencing him to the dinner table. I'm not sure it's even worth the effort to try and fillet a smaller fish when the sea is this messy, because it would be more of a waste if we didn't get all the meat. And filleting it perfectly is almost impossible when we're being thrown all over the place. Garth would have probably ended up chopping his hand off. I can't help but wonder if that's how we keep losing our lures, by catching a small fish that eventually gets nabbed by something much bigger.
I found a boat yesterday. It's the second one we've come across in the last week and it was pretty exciting to have a reminder that we're not all alone out here. Both finds were just on the AIS without getting a visual, because they passed behind us about 20 miles away. The first one was headed to Chile and the second to Argentina. We have yet to see anything else out on the ocean since leaving Tahiti months ago, but I'm sure we'll get our fill of traffic once we get near Panama.
There's not much else to say. We're stuck indoors again because it's such a splashy mess outside. Today I slept, ate, watched a movie, slept some more and read a book, all amidst constant praying to the sea gods to just let us be comfortable for a while. I'll wake up in the morning and do it all again. Different book, different movie, but other than that it often feels like groundhog day out here.
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17/05/15
Day 37
It's finally nice again! Well, bearable at least. We're still getting thrown about a bit but I can finally sit in the cockpit again for the first time since just after we left the Gambier. It took 37 days, but we've finally gone far enough east to be able to turn downwind a bit and head further north. Plus the wind has shifted a bit further south, the waves are a lot calmer and the squalls that kept messing up the wind direction have all dispersed and headed off to make somebody else's life miserable.
A few days ago though I was going absolutely mad. The waves were all small and horrible, so we were bunny hopping over them like the boat was some kind of demented pogo stick. We would go flying over them and crash down with that sickening smack that I've come to know and hate. From inside it was easy to picture us flying through the air as we launched off the top of each wave, though realistically I'm sure the majority of the boat was still in the water. I have a really hard time sleeping whem I'm frightened though. Usually in bad weather I'm a messy high-strung ball of nerves, but it's not the weather that I'm scared of. I'm scared about everything breaking. Probably because everything always breaks. Lying under the blankets in my bed I can picture the gas tanks coming untied and flying overboard, the sails getting expensive rips in them, the jerry cans falling off... Things that won't kill us but will cost a lot to fix and leave us in a pickle if they actually happen. This time it was the dinghy I was worried about. The boat was coming down so quickly and with so much force, I could actually hear the dinghy becoming airborne. It's not secured very well because there's a rope going through the hole in the centreboard case which is attached to the deck. It can't go far and it's stuck in place. But every time the boat hit the water I would picture that rope breaking and the dinghy getting lost at sea. So that made for a few days of restless sleep. I know the boat is strong, but if you hit something with a hammer enough times it will eventually break into pieces. Which is the thought that woke me up every 10 minutes or so the other night, every time we hit the water hard enough to make me feel like we were living inside a jackhammer.
So thank goodness that's over. The only thing that kept me from completely losing it was the knowledge that no matter how horrible things get, time doesn't stop. It keeps going. So even though every minute feels like an eternity of torture, time will keep ticking away and we will keep getting closer to our destination. Which is kind of obvious. But I guess when everything is horrible it makes life easier to know that it will evetually end.
So now I'm sitting under the stars again. Today I actually got to lie out here surrounded by numerous shades of blue and sunshine. Which was amazing. We even managed to put the lure out again and we actually caught a fish! It was a small Mahi Mahi, but this one was big enough to eat. And it was insanely delicious. Now at least we can say we've caught a fish in the South Pacific. Garth's dad caught a few while he was with us, and we got something off the coast of Australia. But since then we've had nothing. We haven't been fishing much on this trip, which sounds ridiculous but has been unavoidable. Since we left the Gambiers we've had the line out every day that fishing was a feasable option and that's probably been less than 7 days all up. The waves have just been so rough that even if we'd caught something there's no way we'd have been able to get it on board and fillet it. Opening a tin and tipping it into a pot without flying all over the boat or losing it on the floor has been hard enough for chef Garth to handle.
We've started to see birds again. I hadn't noticed that they'd been missing, but when they started circling us a few days ago I realised we hadn't seen any since leaving the Gambier. Maybe this part of the world is just so rough and horrible that they couldn't be bothered venturing down here. But they're back! When you spend all day staring at sky, water and waves anything to break up the monotomy is a relief.
Yesterday kind of sucked. We got to open this weeks package of food, which Garth had stored under the stairs with next weeks bag because when we left we couldn't move for all the food stacked up everywhere. So he went to get them out and when he opened the cupboard we were blasted with the stench of rotten milk. Something must have moved around and popped a carton of milk, which had been sitting there for the entire trip getting more and more disgusting. The cupboard is right next to my bed and at the beginning of the trip I had mentioned that something smelled off. I looked everywhere but found nothing and assumed it was an old empty milk carton that had escaped the rubbish, which also lives behind the stairs. So after coating everything else in the bag and then spreading itself all over the container holding our food, the milk had just been left to fester for all this time. So. Gross. We spent an hour or so trying not to vomit as we cleaned off everything in the bag, which then got left out in the sun to dry off. The smell is almost gone today. However, we did have to make up a big batch of pasta sauce with the two packets of salami that got left in the sun to cook. And they really cooked. When I picked them up I nearly dropped them again they were that hot.
There's a lot of phosphorescence in the water here and it's really beautiful. It's always nice to look down and see sparkly dots in the darkness. I've been sitting out here just staring down at the water and watching the glowing wake spread out from the boat then slowly get darker again. Then the waves by the boat light up and the process repeats. It's mesmorising. I wish the dolphins would come back now that the water is all sparkly.
Before we left, I told Garth that the winches needed to be serviced. I gave him the option of cleaning the boat or servicing winches and he took the winches while I finished the cleaning. I didn't actually see him pull anything apart, but he swears he did it. Last time I serviced them it took me most of the day, but he seemed to be done in no time at all. I can't help but feel that if he'd done it properly he would have come inside asking for springs, rags or grease at some stage. He also would have made a massive mess of the cockpit which I would have had to re-clean. But he did it suspiciously quickly and I didn't see any evidence of the alleged maintenance even though he swore black and blue that he did all of them. On an unrelated note, the second speed on our one good winch for the port side is no longer working. To be fair, it's been under a lot of strain over a long period of time because that's the side our sails have been on for almost the entire trip. We've used it a lot from furling and un-furling and furling and un-furling as squalls constantly passed by. Even so, I find the fact that it no longer works so soon after it was "serviced" suspicious. Though I really should have smelled a rat when he failed to make a mess. If you follow the trail of destruction, you'll usually find Garth sitting in a pile of dirt at the end.
Now that the sea has calmed down we're moving a lot faster without having to bounce over the top of all the waves. We're averaging 4 or 5 knots now, but we got up to 7 yesterday when the wind picked up. Yay! We're about 11 days away if we can keep going at 4 knots, or 9 days if we go 5 knots. It's crazy what a difference 1 knot can make over time. Either way we're probably looking at another 264 hours. Not that I'm counting.
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19/05/15
Day 39
Just 855 miles to go! That's 8 more days at the very least. Probably more like 10, seeing as the wind is supposed to die down as we get further north. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd be counting 10 more days of sailing as 'nearly there.' But here we are.
I'm sitting under a moonless sky tonight, with nothing but a scattering of stars to light up the darkness. Two birds have decided to join me and they're kind of freaking me out. They've been circling the boat for hours making clicking sounds. Occasionally some light falls on one of them, showing the great expanse of their wings. But for the most part they move silently through the night before sneaking over to a previously unoccupied patch of sky and making a scary noise. I feel like I'm being tracked by wild animals in the dark and I have no idea where they're going to jump out from.
Yesterday the sea got all bouncy again. The waves went back to being short and steep like before, with one important difference - we're no longer heading into them. The wind has finally shifted to the SE and we've finally started heading further north, which means we're almost downwind. It's lovely. We definitely noticed when the waves change though, as the boat started rocking back and forth and kept doing so all day long. It was too rocky to do the dishes and made cooking a lot harder for Garth, but the day was simply a bit uncomfortable instead of the crippling, unbearable horror of upwind sailing we've experienced for a lot of this passage.
I was just in the process of writing 'today was lovely' when a rogue wave splashed over the side and got water all over me and my tablet. I guess I can't win. For the most part it really was quite nice though. Garth left me to sleep in this morning and then I lazed around reading all day. It was too rough to try fishing yesterday, but we trawled a line all day today. The fish were fighting over the hook! We caught three Mahi Mahi over the course of the day, all of which were thrown back because they were too small to bother with at around 40 - 45 cm long. We lost our bigger lure at the beginning of the passage, so this must be the size of fish we're going to keep catching with this smaller one. All of our squid lures are around the same size, so our chances of landing something bigger don't look promising. We've tied a chunk of rope onto the lure which will hopefully churn up the water a bit more and beef up our squid to look more appetizing to bigger fish. I think tomorrow we'll stick out one of our bigger diving lures as well in the hopes that something yummy will go for it. I don't think it's a coincidence that we're just starting to catch fish now that we're going further downwind. We probably weren't going fast enough before. So I'm going to actively fish tomorrow by keeping a keen eye on both the lines all day. If we catch another small Mahi Mahi we'll probably keep it, even though rough filleting on the floor of a moving cockpit won't produce a lot of meat.
We're just 200 miles off the coast of South America, so we're expecting to run into some boats soon. Hopefully not literally. As Garth was drifting off to sleep tonight he piped up with "if I kited to shore from here it would only take 10 hours." It figures that's what he's thinking about in his sleep. Whilst it's kind of interesting, it's also a disappointing reminder of how slow this method of transportation is. It would take us at least 48 hours to sail there at a decent speed.
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