Getting a little artistic with today’s sunrise shot. Actually that was the last we saw of the sun for most of the morning. A succession of squalls followed which has blotted it out until now, a couple of hours past lunchtime. The squalls were the first we’ve seen on the passage and didn’t amount to much; A couple scuttled past south of us, the two that did run us over only had 25 knots of wind. Far from being unwelcome, the well mannered guests didn’t show up empty handed and brought some fresh water to the party. I was thrilled to see the salt crust and Saharan dirt that had built up over the past weeks streaming off the deck and down the scuppers. While Jaime kept a weather eye at the helm I did my best to help things along by running around in the rain happily scrubbing away with the deck brush.

We spent a couple of days being whisked along by 30 knot winds after that last post. The wind pushed up a sizeable swell behind us (north east) which eventually combined forces with some north westerly swell pushed down to our latitude by some distant storm. This resulted in a 4-5 meter soup pot. We were like a nerdy new kid being pushed back and forth between two big playground bullies. The conditions weren’t dangerous, and we were happy to finally be making decent mileage, but they bred no enthusiasm for fiddling around with the laptop or sat phone. Keeping the boat in order, the care and feeding of crew, and trying to sleep monopolized our time which is why you haven’t heard from us in a few days.

It’s tough to take on anything non-essential in weather like that so once it settled and the swell flattened out we spent a day straightening out the boat. We cleaned out our sea berth (aft port cabin), shook out all the bedding, re-made the bed and put away the pile of dirty clothes. We had collected a pail of fresh water which I used to clean all of the salt out of the cockpit and wash the windows. We cover the settee with sheets for long passages to keep the inevitable salty feet, spills and sweaty backs off the cushions so those needed to be removed, shaken out and rebuilt as well. We ran the engine for a couple hours to top up the batteries, reduced and compressed the contents of our two garbage cans, swept the floors, and had a bath at the end of the day. It was a day well spent, the boat looks great and it made for a huge lift in morale.
There have been a few significant Trans-Atlantic milestones worthy of mention as well. First of all we finally finished working south. Slapdash met the 15th degree of latitude at 40 where we adjusted course to a predominantly westerly heading (267T). So now we’re running along latitude 15, pointed straight at Barbados and this is as far south as we go; it’s all uphill for the remainder of this trip.

We started and finished ‘Treasure Island’ to get in the Caribbean mood and it worked. We`ve been yo-ho-ho’ing ever since. What a great book. Speaking of books Jaime finished War and Peace! Can you believe it? This is probably a good time to mention that even though it’s not quite official yet, this will in fact be the longest voyage of our whole trip. I’ll probably have time to finish the damned book as well. I had hoped to interview Jaime for this piece to find out if she agreed with the inset which proclaims it “the greatest novel in any language” but she’s sleeping right now.

We finished ‘Weeds’, the Showtime series about a drug dealing soccer mom and were disappointed in the third season. In other news we finally ran out of dainty diva vegetables (cucumbers, eggplant, lettuce and what-not) and are down to hearty Viking vegetables like cabbage, onions, garlic and potatoes. Their ruggedness is inspiring. If you had to pick the vegetable most likely to drunkenly cross the Atlantic in an open boat to raid and pillage new lands, it would have to be the bad ass cabbage in a horned hat every time.

Last milestone; we’re on a three digit passage now. Woo-hoo! Now counting down hundreds of miles instead of thousands and it’s a good thing too, I just changed out the propane tank the other day. Either we used more gas than usual or the LPG wizard gave us a light fill. Either way we only got 17 days out of the tank instead of the usual 21. There’s a small reserve that we use to keep the fridge running while we fill the other two tanks which is hooked up now. There’s probably only enough for a few days though, so now we are gas rationing which means that we only run the fridge 12 hours per day, we pre-cooked all of the meat in the freezer in one shot and will eat it cold, and no more coffee or tea. Hopefully these drastic measures will stretch the dregs out long enough to reach Barbados which, by the way, should be on this coming Sunday or Monday.

Regarding fresh water, up to this point we’ve just been conservative with our use which has always worked for us. Now we’re getting into what was formerly called our reserve so have been forced into getting a little more strategic with our usage. If our tanks do go dry we still have a week’s worth of drinking water which is kept separate so we’re not going to run out but we are paying more attention now.

So that’s food, water and LPG which just leaves diesel of which we have stores sufficient for approximately 60 hours of motoring. It’s not a lot but more than enough to keep the batteries topped up, get us into port, or out of trouble.

We saw a sail on the horizon approximately 5 or 6 miles north 2 days ago. At that distance it was just a tiny little white triangle getting lost between swells but well within radio range. We tried hailing them on the VHF but they either had it shut off, were listening to their iPod, or just didn’t want to talk to us. Their heading appeared to be a few degrees north of ours and before nightfall they had disappeared over the horizon, we’re not sure if they even saw us.

That same night at 2:45AM I heard a clink from somewhere up on deck. It’s the kind of sound that you would laugh at if I had a recording because behind the symphony of wind, wake, slamming of waves, groaning of lines, whistling of rigging, and the million other creaks, splashes, clunks, thumps, clanks, beeps, whirs and whooshes our humble clink would be all but lost. After weeks on passage, and years on a boat there are just sounds you hear and sounds you don’t hear. We’ve heard the million sounds above for years now and have every single one of them mentally catalogued. Once in a while one of the less frequent sounds (like “greee-onch”) makes an appearance. Jaime and I might take pause, look at each other for a moment before saying something like “ah, spinnaker halyard rubbing where we’ve tied it down” at exactly the same time. And actually as she read this post she even said, ‘hey do you mean the gree-onch of the spinnaker halyard?’ It is an amazing thing but ask any sailor and they will tell you the same. So this tiny clink gets me out on deck in the middle of the night with a flashlight because it just doesn’t belong. It takes a couple of minutes but soon I notice that a gate clip (?) which fastens the headsail to the roller furler had failed. The clink was the sound of the steal ring at the bottom of the luff end of the headsail whacking the forestay. It wasn’t hard to imagine the luff line being torn out of the furler track with the next gust of wind so I got Jaime up (perfect timing for her 3AM shift) and once she was in the cockpit went forward with a small line and temporarily secured the sail. Once there I saw that spring and pin had fallen out of the gate clip rendering it useless. I detached the clip from furler and brought it inside and after a bit of digging struck pay dirt in the form of a perfect sized nut and bolt to act as prosthetic limb for the lost pin. Back up on the pitching deck armed with clip, improvised pin, and appropriate tools, I completed the impromptu nocturnal project. Jaime finished her watch and I was lulled to sleep by all of our familiar creaks, splashes, clunks, thumps, clanks, beeps, whirs and whooshes.

Last night at about the same time we had a very different auditory adventure. Jaime came inside to wake me up for my midnight shift and told me to just listen for a minute before I got up. Seconds later I heard the pod of dolphins singing to us through the hull. They sound just like the sensor that Hollywood guy in the yellow haz-mat suit has when he’s checking for a radiation leak. Outside you couldn’t hear or see a thing but our little sea berth seemed to amplify their every little wheee, brrrr, click and whistle.

The broken furler clip story really challenged my sailing terminology ( I even had to break out the Chapman’s Guide). To win today’s “cold beer on the Slapdash” contest I’m going to challenge yours. Take a look at the sunrise picture in this post and to win rights to your very own free cold beer on Slapdash identify and correctly name that line!

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