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Starblazer - 05/03/2014 – Motoring has some advantages



During Tuesday we only sailed for 59 minutes and drifted for an hour. There were two periods of drifting: at breakfast time we turned off the engine so the oil could drain down to the sump and John could check the oil level; before lunch John became seriously worried at the low speed we were achieving through the water, he convinced himself we were dragging something so went for a swim. This was the first advantage of motoring; with so little wind the boat drifted with the current and, though he took a safety line, he had no difficulty snorkelling around and found nothing amiss. He called up the boats we could see on AIS and asked them for their log speed through the water and GPS speed over the ground. They all confirmed that there was quite a strong current sending us NW and slowing us down as we head SW; the discrepancies ranging from 0.2 knot (over-reading log?), 0.7 and 1.0 so he stopped worrying about the engine and prop. Our log is under reading so we'll have to remove it and clean it at some point.

The second advantage of motoring was the major activity of the afternoon, playing dodgems with rain squalls. If the engine is on we can afford to use the plotters and radar all the time. Rain squalls show up as ugly red blotches and, if you turn on the trail function, you can see their passage over the last 30 minutes. We successfully avoided one big system travelling at 26 knots, an indication of the winds it might generate. Then we skirted around a smaller system but our luck ran out overnight when we got quite wet, though had no appreciable increase of wind. The squall activity also made the evening rollcall on SSB completely unreadable. There was so much static John turned it off after 10 minutes having heard just one boat about 25 miles away.

On the cooking front, the yoghurt wasn’t successful. I probably didn’t get it into the fridge early enough or the mix was too old or the jar wasn’t really clean. Whatever the reason, we landed up with a cross between cottage cheese and clotted cream! It tasted very good on the fresh fruit salad I made to follow the smoked pork chops, tasting rather like bacon, with mashed potatoes, carrots and green beans. I even created a big tuna salad at lunch time instead of the usual bread and ham and cheese with tomato and cucumber.

NO we haven’t caught a fish, the tuna came out of a tin.

The sun has just risen, it’s getting very warm again, the wind is 4 knots from the east, the sea is just gently rolling and the radar screen is clear, no boats, no squalls, no sailing, nothing.

Joyce

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