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Free & BrEasy - The Long Passage



Its nearly end of Day 8 after leaving the Galapagos and we now have only 2000 nautical miles left to our destination, Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. We have covered 1016nm in just over 7 days which averages out at 5.8 knots or just over 6 mph! Nobody said sailing was fast but its the most fun you can have going that slowly in a man-made transportation device! Even that speed is impossibly fast when we have been experiencing light winds as we headed through the doldrums for the belt of trade winds 5 degrees south of the equator. We have been forced to use the engines so that we don't get left too far behind the rest of the fleet. Our speed has also been helped by a strong equatorial current going East to West. We were worried enough about speed for Roger to threaten to perform the naked wind dance he was taught in Winnipeg but were spared as buckets of wind came and has been constant for a day and a half. Now we are flying along at 7-8 knots and Free and BrEasy is dancing with the waves in a 70s Mick Jagger-like jerky style. Will it continue ? All will be revealed in the next episode...

Meanwhile how does the crew manage to fill in the days? Well first off we try not to think about eating Tuna. After the monster landed on Day 1 we have been eating tuna for lunch, dinner and I am sure, breakfast. Not that there has been any criticism of the excellent culinary skills but - yes you can have too much of a good thing! Eventually we mutinied and forced Roger to cook beef steak with sauted potatoes, carrots and caramalised onions. Delicious but the only ungracious praise he received was "the best thing about this is that its not tuna"! STOP PRESS. We are back to eating tuna and it was great! All the above shows how important food is to the crew. We always eat lunch and dinner together and spend our time chatting about the folks back home. Every time an email is received on the boat it is politely subjected to scrutiny by the other crew members eager for news of the outside world.

The rest of the time is equally divided up between carrying out watches, reading and sleeping. We have 4h watches during the night and morning with two 2h watches in the afternoon so that the night shifts swop around. That means that the "nasty watch" which is 2-6am only comes around every third night. The dancing boat also makes it difficult to sleep so one or more of us is often cat napping with mouth oepn and slack jaw. The reward for the night watches is staring out at the moon lit sea or gazing at the stars as the clouds rush by - all magic moments.

Last night we had a very high spirited meal after a day's run of more than 200nm. There was a near mutiny when Roger hid the liquor locker key to prevent a liquid celebration of this milestone! We were chasing the setting sun before us when we realised that the conditions were right for us to see the "green flash". This is a phenomenon of the very last moments of the setting sun on the horizon due to filtering out all the other colours of the spectrum by the earths atmosphere which is thicker when viewed on the horizon at sea. Any pollution or clouds stop it happening and its often more related to the rum "sun downer" consumed by the observer. We all watched in great anticipation and were rewarded by the sun being momentarily replaced by a pin point of green light just after it had gone down over the horizon.

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