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Endeavour of Cork - Day 7 - Wed 23rd November (again)




Well, the culinary delights just keep coming!! We've just lunched on soup and fresh brown bread hot out of the oven, baked by Conor - YUMMMMM!!! He's busy threatening banana bread for afternoon tea, as our moderate stock of bananas is ripening at an alarming rate and will need to be used up soon. Anais is mad to make crepes, but they're a bit on the egg-heavy side, and we don't have loads of eggs left so the feeling is that bread (requiring 1 egg per loaf) is a better value use of them. We'll also have to start rationing the butter if the hot brown bread keeps appearing - we milled through nearly half a tub of it at lunch alone!

I'm on dinner duty tonight, and would normally revert to my usual Spag Bog (which is about the extent of my boat-cooking repertoire), but Denise reckons there's pork chops that need to be used and has what sounds like very exotic plans for them - involving apples, bananas, and caramel. I hope she's good at giving instructions as that sounds WAAAAY outside my comfort zone!!

A debate has started about whether to stop for another swim - some say that since we have a bit of momentum going (we're motor sailing, getting a small bit of drive out of the sails) we should keep going. We saw forecasts this morning that show an enormous hole of no wind covering half the Atlantic (unfortunately the very half we're halfway through) that is supposed to persist for days, so I have to say that I agree with the "keep going while you're moving" camp. We don't have enough diesel to drive all the way to St. Lucia, but the hope is that we have enough to at least get ourselves far enough to pick up a little wind.

Anais is in her element with all this settled weather, taking sun sights the whole time. If Anne/John Redmond are reading - that little book on celestial navigation you gave me has been a godsend apparently - she reckons she'd be lost without it. She has correspondence notes for the course she's doing, but says that book is filling in all the gaps and she's learning fast. So thanks from her for that!!

The reading is continuing apace - myself and Denise are on our 5th books since setting off (positively a world record in my case!) and the others are all getting through them as well. There is a brilliant selection on board, so we're all spoilt for choice.

A sentence in The Riddle of the Sands struck me as being amazingly appropriate last night - having spent about a month on a small, dingy yacht the narrator finally finds himself in a hotel ashore..... "At ten I was in the perfect bed, rapturously flinging my limbs abroad in its glorious redundancies". Living on this boat for 3 weeks now, sleeping in the equivalent of a 2ft-wide radiator that's permanently "on" these days (berth beside the engine), I cannot wait to fling myself about in the glorious redundancies of a shore bed! But there's a bit to go before that luxury is achieved, so I can't let myself think about it too much just yet.

Right, time for more suncream and another few chapters in the fresh air up top.

Endeavour - over and out!

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