Grainy image from the satellite phone of PolePole surrounded in the busy shipping lane!
During my shift, 3-6am the wind finally hit consistently over 10 knots, so Tom, who I was taking over from put the sails up and turned the engines off, before he went to bed. Lovely to have the quiet whoosh through the water again. By the time I resurfaced at 9:30am they had got the big Asymmetric sail up and we were doing a gentle 6-7 knots boat speed in under 10 knots of wind speed, many times we were going faster than the apparent wind speed(of interest only to the sailors).
In the morning we were just off the coast of Mauritania (40 miles away) which has a huge port, so we have had lots of traffic passing by. The sun is out and it’s definitely getting warmer.
Rowan put a line out to fish mid morning and just before lunch he had snagged a lovely little tuna. Such beautiful things, I felt awful watching its last flap about. But it did make the most delicious sushi for lunch. We came all prepared with wasabi and Ponzu (tasty citrusy soy) sauce.
Sadly the wind died down quite a bit and we landed up making only about 3 knots of boat speed all afternoon. The satellite was whirring with info and the predicted wind did come back around sunset. We seem to have picked an abnormal week of very little wind, the Trade winds are just not playing the game. We got the Asymmetric sail down for the night and put up the Code sail.
Luke, Hannah and Tom enjoyed the opportunity of the calm waters to do serious work outs. Rowan and I are still summoning up the courage!
We feasted on the last of the tuna for supper, accompanied by a delicious rosemary/chilli pepper bean stew. We are not starving although who knows what we will have left in two weeks time. We found our enormous naartjie (satsuma) supply had got some mould, putting a serious dent in our supplies. We had to do a massive pick through and peel and save what we could. I’ve managed to squeeze the remainder into one of our 4 fridge drawers.
The big sail up
Relaxing
Rowan catches a Tuna
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