Thursday November 30th
Still not a lot of wind... Everyone tried hard to keep Hatha Maris moving,
with (no) wind around 3 to 4 kts. Sometimes we even went backwards :-0 !!
Early this morning Sammi, Francesca and Lyss saw a whale and later a
turtle! At 6 am, when the watch from Thalita and myself started, the wind
was coming back a bit and we had the best thing for a good start of the day
– dolphins! At least 20! For me it was the first time (nearly everything
that happens during this trip is the first time for me...) to see them
playing so close to the bow! So great! And with this beautiful start we
then enjoyed a great day with steady wind, sun and many happy people. Sam
feels much better now (she is been quite seasick lately) and we are more
and more into the onboard life. Dancing, singing, laughing…. and sailing of
course!
Francesca and Sam are now getting ready for their watch – time to go to
sleep and get ready for the night. Still not my favourite watch. Good
night. Nicole.
Friday, December 1st 2017
Close encounters of the spanish kind
At change of watch last night a huge light was noticed tucked under the
jib. Look once, look away. Look twice, look away. Look 3 times, and its
definitely not an optical illusion. IT IS another vessel! the AIS showed
not a light house but a 50 metre boat with “moored” as its status while
doing 8-9 knots straight at us. Hailed them on VHF channel 16, nothing.
Dial MMSI, still nothing. Alienic light getting closer, we shine the
searchlight on our sails to make ourselves more visible. After 10 minutes
of watching the “strobe” light as Francesca called it, the alien answered
in Spanish, sounding shocked at encountering our little 12m boat in the
middle of nowhere. Lyss got them to change course and the excitement was
over. Made for a quick watch though… Sammi
Saturday December 2nd, 2017
It is fantastic being the skipper of the boat… you might think it means you
get coffee in bed and tell people what to do, but no, it basically means
that even when we are becalmed I don’t sunbathe, sleep, eat snacks, relax,
or read like everyone else… unless it is instructions manual. At this
point I have had the opportunity to fix a bit of everything, from small
gluing jobs to replacing the pin holding the vang to the boom which had
severed (!), sawing off a piece of a batten of the mainsail, whipping
lines, sewing a new bolt rope tape onto the genoa, replacing a piece of
chain on the forward stay with dyneema (really proud of my splicing that
one)...
Also, I have now developed a much more intimate relationship with Brian and
Kurt: Kurt has been behaving as of late and is not too jealous, but Brian
keeps acting up, gifting us with water and fiberglass sawdust so that I
have to hang out with him a few times a day. No we don't have men onboard
and no, we are not losing our mind (yet)...Brian and Kurt are the names we
have given to our bilges. Much easier than saying 'the bilge forward of the
sink to starboard..' More names to come in the next episodes for sure!
The current challenge at the moment is managing our power as we have
something that is draining the batteries more than is logical. Solar
panels are working, but yesterday our course had them both in the shade
most of the time, making for fun amperage consumption calculations.
And finally our main issue so far has been solved: yesterday was the first
day that our satellite phone actually enabled us to get updated weather
information, and transmit files since we left, hence the three days blog.
Thank you Franco and Brook on the home team helping with that! Weather
routing using the clouds or via satellite sms doesn’t make us very
competitive…
Oh and yes, I admit I did get to go SWIMMING while we were becalmed. It was
absolutely beautiful! Always good to know you can breaststroke faster than
your own boat. Ok, while I was at it I did a hull check and made sure that
the log still worked as we were getting 0.00kn of boat speed for over two
hours… but more on that later.
Lyssandra
