Last night we had a flying fish land ricochet off my head and land in the cockpit. Instead of a squeamish girly response along the lines of "euw ... get rid of him please!!!" I jumped up to rescue the little guy. Tried to catch him in one hand but he was way too slippery so picked him up with both hands, his little wings beating wildly against my palms, and threw him back into the sea. I hope he didn't die of shock. My hands smelled extremely "fishy" for ages afterwards ...
Then - as we were preparing to eat dinner - pasta and Marks&Spencer tinned extra meaty Bolognaise sauce - I remembered some fantastic looking parmesan that Marco had given us in Newport, which his mother had in turn brought from Italy before the start of the race. Oh excellent - real proper Italian parmesan with our pasta! Dug it out of the cave and sadly it was in a pretty bad state ... very green and quite stinky. We all reacted the same way - ooooohhh yuck, we can't possibly eat that!!! I was *so* disappointed. Then I thought - wait a minute, parmesan is such a hard cheese it might actually be ok in the middle. So to the disgust of the boys, I took out my knife (each crew member carries a torch and knife at all times), dug into the block of parmesan, - and salvaged a good portion of it by judicious surgery! I was so proud of myself. It was very tasty too (thank you Marco's Mum!). I would *never* have done that at home ... but needs must etc.!!!
I had another "so cool" moment yesterday. The sun was so hot I was sitting out on the rail, bikini and shorts, trailing my feet in the Atlantic waves thinking - wow, look at me, middle of the Atlantic etc.... And then suddenly a massive wave caught me by surprise and drenched me from head to toe, much to the amusement of my crewmates.
Now, while on the one hand, getting drenched in warm Atlantic waters sounds quite nice, the reality is that you end up covered in salt, and in this environment salt is your enemy. Which is a pity, as we are completely surrounded by the damned stuff. The thing is, it keeps everything damp. So if you get it on your clothes you pretty much can't wear them any more. And no matter how much you leave things in sun to dry, they simply never will. As soon as the temperatures cool, the salt will absorb moisture again.
So - as I was sitting there drenched in salt water, we started to debate the pros and cons of salt.
In the "pro salt" corner we had the following: - margaritas - fish & chips (fries) - salted roasted peanuts - salt crusted steaks
Nothing else. And since we don't have access to either margaritas, fish&chips or steaks at the moment we'd gladly trade our peanuts for the complete removal of salt from our environment at this point!!!
Current position is 38 33.07N, 43 17.35W.
Still have one reef in the main, making about 7 knots to the Azores with 685 miles to go. We should be ashore on Monday. We've been in contact with another OSTAR skipper who is about 300 miles ahead of us and he's now only making 3 knots. How frustrating that will be if it happens to us!!! Keep blowing please wind!!!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment