Northern Light II - Sunday 19th November

Sorry for the delay in sending the blog today - it has been a busy 36 hours.

The winds were light yesterday morning so we decided to put the furling cruising chute up - we managed 8 knots SOG with 13 knots of wind not bad. The chute stayed up to about 5pm when we went back to white sails for the night and sadly, yet again, the winds dropped so we only managed a SOG 5 knots.

During Saturday we prepared all the fishing gear and whilst we were doing that we caught a fish. Sadly not with a line…… a flying fish somehow managed to land on deck, go through a small hatch in Sarah and my cabin ( this was open again to air the cabin) and decided to die on our bed having bounced off Sarah’s pillow and then all over our white bottom sheet. As with the seawater incident all the bedding came off again to go into the washing machine! What is it about our cabin!

At about 10am this morning the Parasailor went up - what a difference 10 knots of SOG in 14 knots of wind. We were level with a boat and now they are 12 miles behind us. A great job by the crew to get the sail up with Geertje in charge of the steering, the main halyard and the working sheet, Sarah on the lazy guy (not me !), Cat on the working guy and Tom and I on the foredeck preparing the sail ti launch and then racing the snuffer. Headsets on for the bow team to talk to the cockpit team with Tom upset that he is always called rubber duck!

Lamb tagine tonight and a decision has been made to fly the parasailor all night based on the wind speeds and forecast - a update tomorrow…

Michael