Wednesday August 9
Day 16 under the bluest sky’s you’ve ever seen…incredible!
1112.0nm traveled, 741 to go on this leg.
26.8nnm traveled in 24 hours…738.4nm to go meaning…we went 26nm to go 3nm in the right direction…that’s a new slowest record for us.
James’ 6-7 pm watch
6:14 pm: James just made us a can of macnchz doctored up with pesto and bacn bits. We’d usually buff up that kind of meal with a sandwich but we ate the last of the bread a few days back and the last of the eggs before that. Actually, we have 4 more hard-boiled eggs for storm eating or to put in curries, but no regular ones.
We definitely need more than 2 loaves of bread next time, but we didn’t realize we wouldn’t be able to get English muffins or pita. More bread products in general, and if something molds, it will feed the fishes.
In cool water, we can also start with more than 18 eggs. There’s a lot of space under the stove against the hull, but it’s no good for eggs while in the Gulf Stream. More eggs and more room in the fridge is a big upside to being north!
We’ve been out of fresh veggies for over a week and that’s fine. The last of the garlic fell in the sink and got drenched. We drank the last of the expensive apple juice yesterday but still have one each orange and cran-pom.
We’re good on chips and trail mix. Lots of rice. Canned goods too. Beans, canned fruit, chili, ravioli, tomato soup, olives, mushrooms…
The only trouble is that almost all our meals from here on out have to be assembled. For example, I can make a coconut curry, but that’s a bare minimum of 4 ingredients and usually more like 10. James does a black beans and yellow rice thing that’s a one-pot delight, but then there’s heating the tortillas and whatever other sauces and seasonings we want to add.
I’m just hoping that any further bad weather moves on as fast as the last one. We can do cold baked beans a couple times but it’s not going to cut it for a long rough period. We would get pretty quickly to the point where cooking is not optional.
Thursday August 10
Dena’s overnight watch
7:06 am: This shit is such a bummer. It’s almost demoralizing to travel all afternoon and all night, but end up having gone pretty much nowhere.
We lost the wind while caught in a mighty current. It was dragging us south, which we can’t afford. We’re already nervously far south after the northerly gales, well south of the waypoint that represents safely out of the high pressure zone and its doldrums.
I finally found an angle for motoring that simply slipped us back along our day’s course. We went east and then we went west and finally, around 3am, we started to make just a little bit north along with the west. At 6am, instead of right on top of yesterday’s noon waypoint, we were a few miles directly north of it.
And! A little bit of a south breeze came up around 3 as well. I shook a reef (pulled to minimize the frapping) and set us the preventer and…nothing. Or, at least, not enough. I pulled the reef back.
So now it’s 7am and there’s still a wispy southerly and I still hope it’ll fill in so we can sail. We’re farther down on the propulsion battery than ever before, so it’s getting rather important, actually!
James’ 9-10 am watch
9:18 am: The breeze hasn’t filled in, but it did turn westerly. Our heading is north-northeast and it’s not enough wind to keep the sails full even though we’re presenting the beam and the wave action isn’t that big. Every little swell empties the sails and then blap, they fill. This could be a long day.
We used the propulsion battery down to 38%, lower than ever before. It’ll take days to bring it back to the 90s. Meanwhile, we have no backup for the house batteries and will need to be thoughtful about when we make water and for how long.
