I have always said this sailing life comes with higher highs and lower lows than land life. Today, it's a high. The spinnaker is up, we are making good progress while not even in the trade winds. It's a joy to sit in the shaded cockpit, we are even having fun doing school. I know, sounds crazy! Today school part will include marking our position on a paper chart, learning about long/latitude, and throwing in some math as well. Tessa has been collecting the dead flying squid we have on deck every morning, and is also enjoying taking pictures with her new camera (thank you, oma and opa!). I got some laundry done, and I'm looking forward to the fritata Tod will be making tonight( we left with 190 eggs, I overdid it, so we will be creative with some eggs dishes). This life teaches me to take it one day at the time, and when it's a great day at sea, it's a glorious one. On a different note, things felt a bit spooky last night during my night watch. An alarm went off on our chart plotter, red sign flashing "vessel dangerously close". I had been looking at traffic for a while, and I didn't see anything other than bright stars. We don't see other boats out here, the exception was last evening when another Pacific Puddle Jumper sailed closeby, the fist sailboat in 5 days. We chatted on the VHF radio for a bit, and then off we went, each a slightly different direction. Back to the flashing red light.. ..I just kept looking around, 360 degrees, but just couldn't see any other boats. After 10 minutes the red sign went away, and during our night switch at 2AM, we figured out that *our* AIS (which shows our vessel's position on other boats' charts, but had been not functioning the day before) was temporarily active again, and it was own own boat that was dangerously close! It's on our never ending "to fix" list, to get our AIS responder working properly again. Manana, manana!
Post script on Thursday:
Question for the day: which part was fiction in the above part? No, you guessed it wrong; school was really fun yesterday. What was fiction was that Tod didn't get to make the fritata, because...the sheet hit the fan so to speak. The fan was that propeller again. Seriously, you would think we are newbies to sailing, and have not sailed for decades and many sea miles. In short, when it was time to get the spinnaker down (too big of sail, so we put it away for the evening), we again managed to get the way tooooo long lazy sheet in the water around the propeller. We hove too, got to boat speed down, and Tod reluctantly jumped in again. Waves were quite high this time, 6 ft is my best guess.
Short story, he untangled it again, but we were just too tired to deal with dinner for ourselves any more. The waves kept strong all night, rocking us like crazy, not much sleep for the adults (it doesn't affect Tessa), and the high day ended up like a real low.....
Stats Day 5: 550 in last 5 days, 2300 to go to Nuku Hiva
Jolanda for Bliss crew signing off for now, at 16 degrees 07' N, 112 degrees 50' W
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That's a great ghost story - conclusion is: you are your own ghost ship! AHHHHHHHHHH!!! ;-) I'm glad you all know what to do when the sheet hits the fan. I'd be so panicked! Love the updates and keep following Tessa's unfazed lead. What a kid! XOXO The Wackers Family
ReplyDeleteMaybe you need to have some hard boiled eggs around for emergency dinners! Said by someone who likes three square meals/day...And with such exciting days, you sure need the food. xoxo petra
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