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Tuesday 6th May. Noon position : 25 48'N 64 57W Noon day run 150 nm

The wind did pick up last night thankfully and we set sail again after only a couple of hours motoring and the wind come morning was up to 20 knots giving us plenty of boat speed. However, the night was quite difficult and coming on watch at 4am was just as it started to rain again. It was horizontal and went straight down my neck; a good way to wake up I suppose. I could not wait for day break so that I could see what was going on with the boat crashing into some invisible confused waves and the wind fluking all over the place - not very pleasant at all. Dawn brought sunshine and a decent breeze from the north east so gave us some angle to our destination albeit tight.

I have been trying all night to get emails. I am doing this over the SSB radio which can be very patchy and last night was one of those nights. I managed to send a blog but no way was it going to let me receive, so no weather, position reports or anything else. Very frustrating. In fact I have been trying all day and again this evening to no avail. Its actually more stress than it is worth.

I have spent an hour or two bailing out the bilges today for my sins. Thought I would have a quick peek and found quite a bit of water and as we had been on starboard tack all morning at a fair angle of heel the water accumulated there so an hour with a sponge and bucket cleared most of it out. It is below the bilge pump so had to be by hand. We have had a bit of water in before sporadically but not like this. All skin fittings are fine, so must be coming in through the sail drive but the engine sump is dry. Any suggestions out there? The most upsetting aspect of this issue is that we had a number of tins of beer stored in there many of which had lost their contents also into the bilge. Nightmare! Insult to injury.

Highlight of the day was lunch without question. Igor volunteered and after finding the beef was a bit off the remaining chicken had to suffice to go with the onion he had chopped. Now being Slovenian, he is unaccustomed to the taste and use of mustard, good old Colmans English mustard to be precise. So left to his own devises and not knowing the taste of the stuff he set about liberally spreading mustard on both pieces of bread as thick as he could manage. Wow.... Neal immediately started sneezing, Dave was crying, I was sweating and Igor, who professes not to like hot things lost it over the side. I pity the fish that eats that bread. I wonder if it is a ploy to avoid preparing lunch in the future? No chance, I love mustard!

There is no doubt that we have a wind hole coming and we need to get further east of the rhumb line to take advantage of the predicted north easterlies the other side, but there could be a long, long motor coming up after a great sailing day today. As we speak the wind is dropping and speed has reduced to 2.9 knots. The time for the engine is nigh methinks.


Charlie
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