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Starblazer - 09/04/2014- Quite a good day



Tuesday had far more positives than negatives! We sailed all day, relatively quickly with the wind just aft of the beam for most of the time. During the night the wind backed and we could only tweak Q (aka Horace the Hydrovane) a little for fear of gybing so we spent several hours sailing in slightly the wrong direction. First thing this morning, when John got up, we changed the sails, dropped the main, put out the poles then pulled out the twin genoas, wing and wing. Now we are sailing in the right direction.

The day’s run to noon was an unflattering 134 NM, mainly because of the problems overnight. The wind has also dropped off this morning. We are hoping to make landfall on Fakarava Atoll on Friday.

John nearly caught another fish yesterday but it got away! The tuna from Monday evening was delicious and we have two more fillets in the freezer.

Lunches have posed a small problem because we have no bread. On Monday I made pizza, quick and easy, yesterday I made two Italian polenta loaves with pine nuts which were very tasty. I have lots of bread flour and yeast but do rely on the bread machine to get the mix to dough stage. All the bread recipe books I have use cup measures for the breadmaker but metric weights for hand. Yes, I have kitchen scales but they don’t work well when the boat is rocking about. Yesterday’s bread turned out remarkably well given the guesswork involved in weighing 450 gr flour and 50 gr polenta!

The time difference between here (Tahiti winter time) and England (British Summer Time) is 11 hours so as I am rather belatedly (2:15pm local Wednesday) writing about ‘yesterday’ it is already ‘tomorrow’ (1:15 am BST Thursday)at home! I’ll try to get today’s blog written rather earlier so you might get to read it the same day as I write it.

SPOT is no longer working. We knew that its satellite coverage in the Pacific was poor and so it has proved to be. The Yellowbrick will continue to work and we will pay to continue using it when we leave the rally.

Joyce

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