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Little Pea - Little Pea's Arc 14 Blogoramma - Time to turn up the heat...



14:57.5N  052:19.6W 
 
Tune of the day: "Call Me Irresponsible", Michael Buble.
 
Day 16.  After the trauma of realising that we had run out of rum last night, our misery continued as we went into a night of light winds which brought our boat speed crashing down.  This morning we therefore set about the task of trying to regain the lost ground.  At 0900 hours we launched Melinda, the largest of our spinnaker kites.  Melinda is a ridiculously oversized sail that really shouldn't be ever let out of the bag.  However, faced with light winds again this morning and needing to do something dramatic to improve our boat speed, we launched her.  Apart from a couple of moments of drama, both involving an intense physical relationship between Melinda and the forestay, she has been flying all day and, this evening with the wind picking up, she is giving us a terrific turn of speed.  We are going to fly her all night, which is borderline madness, but we need to make up those lost miles.  With less than 500 miles to go, and a difficult sailing angle all the way into St. Lucia, this is where we need to turn up the heat....
 
On other matters, its been a fairly uneventful day.  Mike has a wash, which was pleasing for all of us.  Ben, on mother watch, spent the day producing miracles in the galley out of our rapidly dwindling food supplies.  Jags fixed Beryl's drive unit which had managed to work itself loose and was threatening to turn into a dangerous object on board.  Minkey became the star of the day by managing to clear all the seaweed off the rudders which has been slowing us down, albeit he did it quite by accident when a nasty squall forced him into a gibe, followed by a tack (in effect a 360 degree turn of the boat) at 0600 hours this morning.  By mid afternoon he was sufficiently de-traumatised from this nautical aerobic event to start talking again and acknowledge the praise the rest of us were offering him. 
 
We'll do another LP agony aunt tomorrow, but in the meantime, we are grateful to all those of you who have provided suggestions for Mike's marathon training schedule.  Today, he made a positive start by doing 4 partial pressups in the cockpit.  Mike strongly argued that, in combination, this totals 1 full press up and thus represents a solid base in his training schedule.  We all agreed that, at this rate of progress, the 26.2 mile London Marathon will be little more than a breeze for Mike when he crosses the start line in 3 months time....  
 
Please keep sending your questions and messages of support to [email protected]

Daily Stats:
 
Max Boat speed = 9.0 kts 
Number of spinnakers used = 1, but what a beast...
Maximum Gust =  20 kts
Number of Flying Fish = A little one committed suicide and was found on the foredeck this morning.
Number of Birds = 1, which arrived from nowhere and followed us for 2 hours hunting flying fish.
Amount of Rain = Enough to desalinate the North Atlantic ocean, all of which fell during Minkey's night watch...
Advent calendar highlight = currently in the fridge trying to reconstitute the chocolate treats into something solid
 
Jags, Minkey, Ben and Mike

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