last blog entry from the big brother / little brother yacht

In a surprise move, I have decided to jump ship in the Azores - so this
is my last blog for this little adventure.

Faial is an absolutely gorgeous island, and Horta a lovely town,
extremely friendly and laid back. Following our "showers" the other
night we went and found the famous Peter's Sports Bar and had a
fantastic dinner and some beers with one of the other OSTAR skippers,
Mike Collins. Peter's Sports Bar is directly underneath the Scrimshaw
Museum; it has a lot of scrimshaw on display but the most prominent
decorative feature there is the countless burgees from various yacht
clubs around the world that adorn every inch of wall and ceiling space!
Pity we didn't bring ours...

And then we came back to Dinah and slept... and slept... and slept! It
was so wonderful not to have to get up to do a watch. And totally
amazing to sleep in a bed that wasn't constantly doing its utmost to
pitch its occupant unceremoniously out onto the floor!!! And then we got
up in the morning and got to have a proper shower ... how cool is
that!!!

So back to my decision to leave the boys bring Dinah home double-handed
... mainly I guess because I'm a wimp! I miss my home, I miss going for
a run, I miss fresh vegetables!

The trip was an incredible experience, and one that I'll always treasure
in my memory... I have pushed myself well out of my comfort zone and not
only survived but in reality enjoyed the experience. I have a much
better understanding of why Barry is so passionate about the sea -
there's a real sense of "peace" when you're at the mercy of Mother
Nature.

I will miss the boys. I'll miss the sense of adventure. I'll miss the
amazing skies on night-watches and other moments of the most incredible
beauty. And I'll miss the opportunity to bring Dinah into Cork Harbour
in 10 days time - which I think will be hugely emotional, particularly
for Barry who is now almost into his 11th week of his adventures.

And so with that, I wish Dinah and her reduced crew a Bon Voyage! I'll
be eagerly awaiting you in Cobh!

Aileen's Adventure - Out.

shower (of sorts!) food and beer

Ashore at last!!!! Hurrah!!! 2200 miles (and then some!) and we are finally on dry land.

Sadly the showers at the marina were closed when we got here (they close at 7pm for future reference!). We were all so incredibly disappointed at having to live with ourselves for another 12 hours that we decided to shower with the hosepipe on the side of the marina. It was perfect!!! The best shower I've ever had in my life! Some of the locals seemed to find our behaviour a little odd, and one group asked us if we are Norwegian...!!!

We've also sourced beer, and are now off in search of food...

More tomorrow ... not sure what time we will be surfacing in the morning though!

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55 miles to go

First things first - Scrimshaw. Thanks to all of you for your answers. Turns out that it really is a word and Jim wasn't making it up after all.

Scrimshaw-n-1 the art or craft of fanciful designs on shells,whale's teeth, walrus tusks and the like, practised by sailors during long whaling or other voyages.In art form known as scrimshaw, a nineteenth century whaler has carved his memories on a horn cup{Macleans} 2 A shell ivory,or the like,so carved or ingraved. 3 such articles or products collectively-vt--to decorate or produce as scrimshaw.vi to do scrimshaw work.{American English; origin unknown]

Second things second - where on earth are we? 38 31.12N, 29 49.64W.

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55 miles to go .... Making about 7 knots at the moment. So we should be ashore by nightfall, eagerly seeking showers, a bar and a decent restaurant - in different order of priority depending on which one of us you ask! First though we will have to check in with Customs, so we are effectively grounded at the marina until that formality is complete. We understand from other Ostar skippers that this is quite efficient in the Azores. When you come into port you hoist a "Q" flag and the customs people come find you and take you through the paperwork. However, we will be arriving outside normal office hours so we might need to wait until tomorrow morning before we're cleared to explore.

On my morning watch I had visits from 2 separate groups of dolphins playing around the bow, as if to say "Come on little Dinah, this way, follow us ...".

Being volcanic islands the Azores are extremely tall so apparently you can see them from a very long way offshore. So all eyes are peeled now... a competition to see who will have the privilege of shouting "Land Ahoy!"

well - i guess i asked for it!

Having complained about light winds recently and saying how frustrating it would be if our approach to the Azores was incredibly slow - I seem to have conjured up significant wind to take us the last 150 miles or so. At the moment we've got about 28 knots, one reef in the main and we're flying along. I saw my top sailing speed ever - 15.7 knots surfing down the back of a wave, very cool!

Position is 38 4.2N, 31 58.7W.

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Hopefully another 24 hours will see us ashore and having showers!!!! Yippee!!!! I've heard the "nice hair" comment (accompanied by a cheeky smirk) one too many times now!!! Not to mention, day 16 without a proper shower or washing my hair is a serious personal record, and one that I never never ever ever intend to beat... it's really awful to be honest!

My ipod is on it's last legs. I guess the almost total submerging by a salty wave a few days ago didn't help it. Being the older sister of Barry and 15 years older than Andy, all my music is seriously uncool anyway - so I'm getting no sympathy from them.

More tomorrow when hopefully we will at least be in sight of land. Come on the Azores!

PS - I forgot to mention - if anyone reading yesterdays blog was wondering what a "scrimshaw" is - we don't know either! If anyone does know, please drop me a note!

Azores here we come!

Less than 300 miles to go now. We're at 38 20.82N, 35 15.85W and have a lovely 14 knots behind us so we're running along nicely at about 7 knots with just the miansail up. Dinah sails very nicely on this point of sail so it's all quite civilised!

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We've started to make lists of things that we need to get in the Azores - spare alternator belt and more chocolate being the top priorities!!!

Various people have been sending us info on Faial, where is the best food, the best beer, places to see etc... One of Barry's friends, Jim, sent us this gem that I thought I'd share with you. Hope it makes you laugh as much as it did us. Really looking forward to getting there now!

------------ The Azores are a group of half-volcanic, half-spinach-based islands in the middle of the Atlantic. In fact, the Azores are located EXACTLY 0.4792 of the way between Baltimore Maryland and Dino's chipper, Kinsale.

The Azores were initially colonised by a clan of Eskimos, fleeing Genghis Khan's little known invasion of the North Pole in the 1400s. These Eskimos soon intermarried with the native midgets.

Today, the Azores are renowned for their pottery depicting the space shuttle and for a type of flax woven from the threads of old bunting.

Local traditions include the ritual shaving of the heads of visitors to the islands. Guests are often given tracts of land on the remote, out-lying islets in return for telling the mayor who shot JR.

Horta's scrimshaw museum is highly recommended, for all keen lovers of scrimshaw and scrimshaw-related bric a brac.

Visitors are encouraged to draw primitive rock art paintings of their vessels at the marina but are warned that any phallic symbology is punishable by death. The victim is scrimshawed to death over a period of two days.

Mark Twain visited Horta at some point in the past on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem where he hoped to open a pet food franchise. ----------------------

so sloooowwwwwww

Unsurprisingly I guess, we lost our wind during the night. We've now been motor sailing for the whole day and progress is painfully slow. I'm not even going to tell you how many miles still to go as I don't want to think about it. Position is 38 13.6N, 37 13.07W.

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We're now thinking it'll be sometime Tuesday before we get ashore. The end point seems to be moving out at the same rate as we're approaching it!

Anyway - the main excitement of the day was in the morning as we motored along. Andy and I were driving Barry mad with our chorus of "are we there yet?!" and "can we do some sightseeing today please please please???!". And in the distance I spotted - a tuirtle!!! Hurray - a turtle, we've been looking for one of them to add to our collection of wildlife.

So Barry said - right, let's go sightseeing then!!! And we turned around to pursue this poor unsuspecting turtle. Andy and I scrambled madly for cameras and got a couple of good shots. You can see how amazingly blue the water is. He was quite a big beast, probably a couple of feet wide at least. As we circled around him he took a dive to get away from us, and we were quite surprised at how quickly he could move when motivated to do so. But he surfaced again fairly quickly and we circled him once more before leaving him wend his merry way to wherever he was headed.

We changed our watch hours last night by an hour, which meant I was on deck for the moon rise. It was absolutely stunning. Down to the last quarter or possibly the last eighth, and bright red as it rose. So red in fact that just as the tip came above the horizon, for a brief few moments I had a little internal panic thinking it was the port navigation light of a vessel that had crept up quite close to us!

We've spent the afternoon huddling in the shade of the mainsail trying to stay out of the sun. Down below it's been 33 degrees during the afternoon, the hottest yet - partly because of course we've had the engine running all day. So we welcome the cooler evening temperatures now, and look forward to some wind picking up in the next few hours. PLEASE!!!

torture on the high seas...

Remember my lovely "distance-to-go-meter" that I was waiting to kick in once we went below 999miles to Faial? Well ... I couldn't believe my eyes when I went on deck for my first watch this morning to find that it has been taped over with red electrical insulating tape!!! NOOOOOOO... how am I going to track our progress now???? It's torture!

It turns out that Andy taped it over, not as a joke which was my initial assumption, but because he finds it frustrating to watch it tick by so slowly and not really be able to influence it very much. Amazing how two people can love and hate the same thing! Still it's a good reminder that "it's about the journey, not the destination" and that we need to live in the present rather than be constantly focused on some future goal - so I am trying to learn these lessons from Andy's frustration.

We made great progress overnight, but our wind has dropped significantly this morning. We're back on our full mainsail (first time in days) at 38 25.67N 40 38.78W.

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We will be saying goodbye to the 40s this morning, and probably we will need to do some motoring in the afternoon to keep some kind of decent pace going. We have 560 miles to go`(she says, immediately ignoring her philosophical statements about the destination versus the journey!!!). I can see this on another instrument down below - but don't tell Andy!!!

We are now out of the gulf stream. The water temperature has dropped by about 3 degrees - it's still very warm (27 degrees) but over a comparitively short distance it's a significant drop. That has sadly put an end to our sailing jellyfish friends and the flying fish also have thinned out significantly (no midnight boarders last night).

A couple of people asked me what do we do "on watch" - and the simple answer is - "we watch".

First and foremost we watch what's happening in our immediate vicinity. - Are there any hazards in the water? Just now for example we have seen an oil drum thing float by, which would not be good to hit... a few days ago we saw a whole tree trunk in the water.... - Are there any other vessels nearby? These are rare (like one a day) at the moment, but as we approach the Azores the frequency will increase.

You're also watching the weather and how Dinah is handling it. - We currently have her set to sail at a certain angle to the wind (80 degrees at the moment). Every so often the wind will shift, and sailing at 80 degrees may no longer be taking you where you want to go ... so you might need to adjust your course, and/or how your sails are configured. - Also you need to keep track of the wind strength - in lighter winds you need more sail area to maximise your speed - but you need to be careful you don't get any surprise gusts that would be difficult for the autohelm to handle. - And you keep an eye on the cloud formations and how they are travelling. Is there any thunder/lightening in the area (in which case you'd pay more attention to your paper log just in case you lose your electronics). Might there be the possibility of stronger winds or wind shifts associated with clouds? And optimistically, might there be any possibility of some rain associated with the clouds to remove some of this accumulation of salt!

And then you're doing a combination of - thinking... very deep thoughts like how did I get here, where am I going, etc... Watch out world - this amount of space to think about things can't be good! - listening to music / audiobooks etc... - watching the local wildlife - trying to avoid the worst of the splashes - if there are more than one person on deck then chatting, singing etc.

So that's it really ...