Rowan goes overboard (on purpose)

January 23 Day 14

Another day of frustrating wind conditions, with a few hours of motoring when the wind died. Any wind that was blowing was taking us North and not what we want as St Lucia is now in a straight line from us. The water was a little choppy, but mainly a sunny day with only a few squalls.

Scary Spice (The WingAker) up for a short time

Having gathered everyone’s washing it was hugely frustrating to find the washing machine has decided to stop working. It’s too clever for its own good, with fancy blue tooth stuff, plus it’s an Italian machine built for the French so we don’t have a manual in English. Hand washing it is for everyone.

We had a blog update from Duco, on the Dutch boat Brainstorm, detailing their abandoning of the boat, quite terrifying. I will add it to the blog when we are in St Lucia as it is very well written, he also describes the beautiful old French boat Rhapsody that picked them up, they have very intrepid sailors on board, 3rd generation Cognac family with loads of booze of board to calm the Dutch guy’s nerves! Poor Menno the other Dutch guy, it was his father’s boat, I think he said he was 24 and had just sold his IT company. The other two Dutch crew were friends of Menno’s Dad, they had all met for the first time in Las Palmas, a few days before departure, the crew were taken on board by the English boat, What’s Next.

Duco’s entertaining blog

It is amazing that since leaving Cape Verde we have only seen one other sailing Vessel that we overtook a day after leaving the Verde Islands, it was not on the Arc Rally. We saw another huge fishing boat yesterday, which could be the same Japanese one we saw a few days ago. We really do feel all alone out here. We had one call on the vhf for PolePole but the squelch was so bad we gave up. They were definitely not calling Mayday, so assume it was a call for a chat.

I forgot to mention yesterday that on one of the calm patches Rowan decided to inspect the props, rudder and dagger boards as we have a vibration we can’t identify. I was a bit anxious him plopping overboard, but luckily he is a strong swimmer. He surfaced requesting a knife as he had found a big piece of fishing rope around the rudder. He got it off and hope it solves the vibration issue, however it is only apparent over 8knots boat speed and we haven’t had much of that in this windless zone. Our Topping line is still doing a good job of replacing the main halyard, fingers crossed it holds to St Lucia now.

We had a few rounds of Speed Scrabble that Han is a demon at! She has also perfected making Mocktails, fruit juice with ginger ale, a dash of Angostura and slice of lime, with one of my enormous ice cubes. It’s been two weeks without a drop of alcohol. We also found some much better truffle salt in Las Palmas, so we enjoyed an enormous bowl of truffle popcorn.

Luke cooked us a delicious mushroom risotto with our reconstituted dried out mixed forest mushrooms. Followed by baked bananas and toasted pecan nuts, and my home made yoghurt. It was the first time to use my yoghurt maker and I was a little apprehensive as it says do not move the pot while it is working, which is pretty impossible on the boat. Using UHT milk means you don’t have to bring the milk to the boil first, so all in all a very simple operation and a great result.

Another glorious sunset and everyone staggering off to bed at 8:30pm to face the night of shifts.

Ginger Spice up for sunset