Yayy - into double figures of days at sea! And nobody's killed anyone yet.
Miles to go to our waypoint at St. Lucia have dropped to 904 now, so we're (well, I'm) on a countdown now. So much more heartening to see numbers dropping than rising - I wonder why that is???
We got a fair bit of sailing done yesterday, the wind was pretty constant at about 15kts but dropped once darkness came so we motored through most of the night. Or at least I think we did, I slept like the dead for most of it as Conor - a bit belatedly, mind you - made a magic discovery - a ventilation system for the cabins!!! Not exactly ice-cold aircon, but the next best thing. Once we'd managed to master not blocking the vent with our clothes, a lovely cool (well, marginally cooler) breeze set in and it made for really pleasant sleeping conditions. So apart from getting dragged out of the bunk at 4am for my watch, I had a peaceful, dreamless night's sleep - the first I can remember!
Poor Dermot is worn out fishing at dawn and dusk every day, with not a single fish to show for it. He did catch one pretty little thing (lovely even to my jaundiced eye) the other day, but given that it would have made a fairly modest lunch for him alone, it got thrown back in to fight the good fish-hook fight another day. Today he's decided to bring out the big guns (not literally) and produced a fishing rod from somewhere under his bunk - the war on fish has properly begun.
I finally got a bit of laundry done - an awful lot of effort and I hope to goodness it dries, there's still an awful lot of black clouds around. One casualty in the hanging-out process was a pair of knickers - maybe Dermot can retrieve them with his fishing rod!!! Conor did offer to throw the boat into a knickers-overboard maneuver, but I said no need unless I was attached to them at the time.
I've always had a thing on boats about not having music or other entertainment - for no real good reason I've always thought that the sound of the water and the sails (and shackles banging and halyards clanking and various other things groaning and moaning and not just the crew) was entertainment enough. But last night I graciously allowed the ever-wonderful Billy Joel to keep me company on watch from 4-6am, and I have to say it was just lovely. An album I haven't listened to for years and years, so a real throwback to schooldays and the tennis club where we were all mad about him. I'm thinking of trying out WA Mozart tonight, to see how he improves the mid-ocean atmosphere. Shame I don't have Handel's Water Music! In fact, I'm now regretting not loading up a whole lot more music on the phone, but back home before we left Dublin I really never thought I'd listen to any of it.
Right, radio net time again - yesterday's was a total nightmare, just static and interference, and we could hear about 5 boats out of the 35-odd who participate. We don't know if that was just conditions (unspecified) or because the fleet is now so spread out that we need to change band (wavelength? channel? this is all gobbledegook to me). Lets hope today's is more successful anyhow, it's proven to be a lovely hour's diversion every day, and we knock another hour's entertainment from plotting each boat we get a position for on our little homedrawn chart, and figuring out who's nearby (nobody, usually!)
Endeavour - over and out.