Sunday August 6
Day 13 in our neighborhood started with that aforementioned brew…warm and black with a kick of consciousness at the end. The world’s ocean rolls and lulls us along at the pace of 2.4 knots. The speed of the verse today. I just love the colors of everything.
A little yellow and red fish quickly inspects a man-o-war then ducks back under the boat for shade. We are a part of this world moving and living within this living and constantly moving system of careless intensity.
Over the last 24 hours we traveled 58.4 nautical miles…not so great but hey we live here what else are we going to do?
We seem to have come in to some settled weather…the clouds are the white fluffy variety and the winds are directly behind us and constant.I would prefer having more sail out but this is nice, we’ll take it.
The hours off watch have become almost the same as the hours on watch. Lovebot drives Cetacea…we glide along within her protection away from another sunset.
Dena’s 4-5 pm watch
4:08 pm: I worked on Shriving for three hours and that meant reading what I’d already written so I have a running start at what is left to cover. It felt like a lot so I checked the project stats and remembered suddenly that this is part of what withered my energy for the manuscript last time. I’m maybe a third of the way through the story and I have almost a hundred thousand words.
Wow.
This time, I’m going to just keep on going and not get stymied by the idea that there are a shit ton of darlings I’m going to have to kill. (Kill your darlings is one of those creepy sayings in the writing world, meaning get rid of anything that doesn’t move the story forward.)
I’m both looking forward to and nervous about putting fresh words in this story. Not too sad there’s a lot of catch-up work to do first. Ha!
Monday August 7
James’ 10-11 am watch
10:22 am: I didn’t call it fast enough.
We’d been verging on reducing sail for a while, but the wind was steady. I would have pulled a third reef if we had one, but I didn’t think I needed to get the main down altogether.
Then, it picked up a tiny bit and I looked aft. A cloudbank that had seemed part of the cumulous pile on the horizon was bearing down on us. I went below to use the head and ask James to be the cockpit guy for the switch from main to yankee.
I had the sail down but not tied to the boom when the rain started. James dove into the lazarette for the companionway door that we remove underway and then ducked below with a “Stay on the boat, okay?”
Fair enough. I was wrapped around the boom and on my feet…meaning precarious. Yes, I had my tether clipped onto a strong point, but I don’t want to find out how many ribs one breaks when reaching the tether’s end under the force of a hard fall.
Moments later, I cracked the companionway enough to yell below, “Safe in the cockpit.” And now we’re both belowdecks. Since I was already wet, I completed a wash-up and changed into dry clothes.
I’m pretty satisfied with how that went. If I’d have called it 5 minutes earlier it would have been better, but it’s all good.
