Days 3 and 4 usually are more relaxed, compared to the first two days of the passage. The biorhythms get used to life at sea, which includes the continuous motion from the waves and the need for a day and night watch. With three adults on board, night watches get considerably shorter than for a couple only, what a luxury!
So we had more time for party: we celebrated the crossing of the 20st meridian which happened to be in the middle of the night. The boy set the alarm clock. At 4 a.m. sharp one pair of proudly looking kids eyes appeared at the cockpit. I welcomed him to the party and suggested to get properly dressed. The search for his clothes however made him so tired that he fell asleep again on the next bunk. So we’d better party during the day. To eat, kids choose popcorn and sour worms. Captain offered drinks and the ladies on board even made colorful paper decorations for it.
Later the same day Jeanette is the one who realizes that we are just about to pass the half way point to Mindelo. That calls for another great party, namely a Half Way Party (this is a thoroughly legendary term for some of my dear readers!). As we discuss to celebrate this one, we whiteness the fishing rod going all the way back. “Fish! Big Fish!” Our fishing line is really strong, the last meter even in steel so that fish can’t bite it off. The line is unfortunately not strong enough and snaps. You know what? Mr BigFish now carries a beautiful lip piercing. It is a bluish-silvery jelly octopus, contributed by Swiss blue water cruisers Carmen & Maurice. RIP, dear Jelly Octopus. You were the best lure we had. Dear Carmen, I believe to know that you really liked this particular octopus. When we will be back in Switzerland, we shall party for luckily pierced Mr BigFish. Apologies for the loss!
Noteworthy is also that we are back in Summer, on a day mid November. Day temperatures are like on a convenient beach day with water finally being up to 25 degrees C. It is hard not jumping into the deep blue. Problem is that the way back onto the boat could be troublesome (if not dangerous) with the boat rocking up and down in the seas. Anyway, no one on board misses typical November weather in our home places Switzerland and Sweden.
After we had a bird messing up to whole starboard deck last night we had his colleague sitting inside the boat on the galley this night. It must have come through the open hatch above the galley. Sure the galley gave a nice toilet for him. Markus was actually out on the watch when he heard some very uncommon noise inside. There was the bird, but the noise was like a cat which would continuously start to hiss. Chhhh. Chhhh. Chhhh. First I brought the bird out. It was weighing just nothing. Incredible how they can survive at sea. As expected the noise didn’t stop when the bird was away. Chhhh, Chhhh, Chhhh, … The engine room was ok, the water maker in the cockpit locker and the fridge as well. Finally we found that pressurized water hose underneath the galley board died after four month of use only, a manufacturing mistake. But why did hissing start and stop all the time? The puncture in the hose was relatively small, so small that the water pump was able to fill the pressure vessel for a few seconds each time. Good that we carry all kinds of spare parts, also water hoses. Issue fixed.
Another defect was that the position tracking for our boat failed shortly after we left. We could start tracking of the error only with a big delay. The cause of the error was that we had to re-configure the interface between our satellite communication system and the weather software. When doing that, the weather software has re-directed our tracking signal to the weather company. This remained undetected by myself since the setup for tracking is not in the same menu as the weather interface. Apologies to the ones who were frightened for some time. Please rest assured that everybody is fine and we have a great time together.
Let’s talk about sailing:
A sail change at three o’clock in the morning is quite a mind challenging task. Actually we took the Code Zero light wind sail down and changed to a poled out genoa. There were not less than eight different lines in the area. You don’t want to mess up with these ones, and one action which is not clearly thought to the end can easily trigger an unwanted event. Markus likes such tasks. The ladies however didn’t like seeing me on the foredeck at night with the waves rolling the boat.
To make it even nicer, we have reached a first sailing culmination for our entire trip so far. There were force 6 winds from astern and waves peaking up closely to 3 meters. For a couple of hours the boat was going really fast. We were often above 8 knots of speed, well competing which much faster boats. Another boat remarked their respect about our sailing performance over the VHF radio. We put it down to our nice Swedish Hallberg-Rassy design and the Swedish sail trimmer. Once Yuana was even doing 11.2 knots when surfing down a wave. The boat felt so stable and kind of unaffected by the waves. It was a big pleasure, and the weather gods may be kind enough to give us more of that!
Data log
Day 4: 150nm
Day 3: 148nm
Day 2: 126nm
Day 1: 134nm
Atlantic accomplished. Twice. 