Pasta La Vista

Well we had a night of rain last night, wet and windy but from the East so blowing us in the right direction but the worst direction for getting rain down the hatch and onto the instruments. Alastairs hat makes adequate protection for the Chart plotter preventing the rain from turning off the autopilot although some of the screens have altered somewhat this morning. We’d reduced to only the poled out genoa just before Saturday’s; packet of crisps as a treat,  along with our sundowners. A  brown, furry, juvenile Sulid had joined us for the evening sitting on the liferaft after finding the solar panels too slippery for him. He was a handsome chap  and spent a lot of time preening himself before tucking his head under his wing and sleeping. He flew off at dawn this morning. A Sulid is the family from which Gannets and Boobies etc come from he looked like a brown gannet with a brown beak.

We are making fairly satisfactory and steady progress at the moment, if things continue as they are we should be able to anchor for some of the night on Monday / Tuesday before going alongside on Tuesday morning after fuelling.

Stephen made a good Spag Bol last night and we followed it up with tinned fruit and cream, without the cream, because we couldn’t find it. It has now turned up. Alastair is, maybe, going to make a lasagne tonight,  Katharine had a recipe for it with lentils which sounded yucky  but as we don’t have any lentils we’ll maybe go for the full fat version.

As it’s Sunday, for a change we had a big plate of scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast which  went down well and made a nice change from porridge. As it was still raining we had it down below which is a bit stuffy. It’s fine now and having had a pot of coffee we’re all doing morning things; dozing, reading, blogging etc.

I have an mp3 player with me which plays through the radio, I put it on ‘play any track’ last night and we had some Chopin, Tubular Bells, Chicago (Both went for the gun, the gun, the gun etc) all good stuff. It turns out that the only way I can currently charge the MP3 player is using a 220v charger plugged into an inverter which is silly, it takes about 5 amps from the batteries, hopefully I’ll be able to get a usb charger for it. It’s possible the other crew  won’t be similarly hopeful as my taste in music may not be the same as everybody elses.

We did 175 miles yesterday and it’ll be about the same today, the forecast has light winds going to the ESE but it’s been speaking with a forked tongue recently so we’ll see what actually happens.

The first of our two fresh water tanks stopped sucking this morning,  I should think it would have done another few days had we not been rolling about so much but the pump kept sucking air as the water was thrown around. Not bad going  seeing as with one profligate crew in West Highland week we went through a tank in 36 hours.

Slainte

Jock and the Team.