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Tulla Mhor - Day 5: Big Rollers



After the lovely flat calm seas of the first few days we are now in the big Atlantic Rollers with about 3m of swell making the boat move up and down, side to side. Everyone has been a little bit queasy with a run on the sea sickness pills.
Everything on the boat moves around and although we have anti-slip mats last night we had a chicken disaster when the boat made a particularly violent screwing motion. A pan with fried chicken leapt off the counter top on to the galley floor including the door and floor of the cabin immediately behind. This is Hugo’s cabin our youngest crew member who has just graduated and is vegetarian. He still thinks the easiest way to find things is to leave them on the floor so everything was covered with bits of chicken. Managed to retrieve most of the food for the meat eaters and another quick flash fry it was all good to eat. I think all of Hugo’s kit was sorted and we continue on our way.
It is going to be a very dark passage: the moon, which is now quite small, rose at 3.30 and soon we will have no moon. There was almost full cloud cover so no stars and difficult to see the horizon. I do not much like sailing with so little light, hurtling on into the darkness. A small bonus is the fantastic phosphorescence which is magnified behind us by our Watt and Sea generator.
Our cruising chute came down through the night in the early hours off Tuesday and we are now sailing with a poled out gib and reefed main making steady progress in about the right direction. We get excited if we spot another boats on AIS.
We have not managed to catch any fish, although we have had a couple of bites but they got away.  We are still trying and hopefully soon fresh fish will be on the menu.
The weather has taken a turn for the worse and we have steady rain needing full oilskins. All looks a bit too much like home sailing.
I’m surprised to be able to write this as was not even able to read on our way down to the Canaries but am using hyoscine patches and they seem to work quite well for me.
Hoping for some sunshine and fish.
 
Val

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