It was a busy day on Charm!
Cleaning day went well – all the participants cleaned their respective areas without complaint.
After that, there were all kinds of activities. We gybed Le Grand Bleu and Joe discovered a small tear in the leech tape so she came down and Mini Spinny went up. Gemma got a splicing lesson from Joe and made a nice rope with two loops on it, mainly to practice splicing but Joe plans to use it to reinforce our reef lines somehow. The girls pretended to be dogs or sea creatures or tigers or all of the above and Cobin read his book, played with his robot, and started a rubber band war against Gemma.
We all paused to see the only things we’ve seen on the ocean since our courteous archery target fish companions paced the boat about a week ago. Today we sighted . . . multiple floating buoys!! Some of them came up on the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and some didn’t. Some had flags and little companion buoys and some were just on their own. We don’t know why they are there but someone wants to find them again because they have registered numbers on the AIS which is normally only used by commercial and recreational boaters. Perhaps they collect weather data? Who knows? For some reason I was particularly thrilled each time we passed one. Maybe like encountering a 7-11 in the middle of the desert. Except with fewer Slurpees, or really anything that a 7-11 has.
Tully pestered me all day to make “margaritas.” She has been flipping through a beautifully illustrated cookbook that I received at our white elephant gift exchange in Cape Town. It has a lovely picture of icy cold, fruity drinks and she wanted me to make them. I put it off because I wasn’t sure that our tiny little European-style blender (basically a large wand with a small propeller-like blade at the bottom) would actually be able to cut ice. I envisioned a lemonade with chips of ice and wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. Finally, I gave in and they were amazing! After some horrible initial sounds, the little blender stick went through all the ice and turned it into just the right level of slush. Three trays of tiny ice cubes (our entire stock) was just enough for 6 icy drinks, made in three batches. I’m already making more ice for tomorrow.
It was hard to complain too much about the heat (although we did anyway) after having Cobin’s ice cream (we just bypassed the machine and put the mixture in the freezer) and frozen margaritas at dinner time. When Joe woke up from his nap, he threw buckets of water on us (at the girls’ request) and that helped too.
All of us are getting much better at raising and lowering the spinnaker because we have been doing multiple sail changes to try to eke out as much wind as we can. Joe and Gemma repaired Le Grand Bleu (maybe I should use LGB but I feel like I should try to find a “T”) and she will be available if we need her. Mini Spinny lets us sail directly downwind and, because she is symmetric, she can float around out in front and we don’t need to gybe her. But she’s not as big as Le Grand Blue (asymmetric so has to be flown more like a “normal” sail and needs to be gybed so we can’t go dead downwind) so we have to balance the hassle of sailing LGB (we can’t steer exactly where we want to go) with the pleasantness of going a bit faster.
Only tiny updates on the battle fronts. Gemma spotted a moth flying out of the dry storage and used her ninja moves to capture it. I had no encounters with the greased pig today. Joe told me there was no validity to my idea about the freezer not working as well at sea (although he said it differently) so we still can’t explain why Cobin’s ice cream maker isn’t working but it’s a moot point because we still had ice cream. Cobin insisted that the ice cream maker would have given the frozen custard a better texture but the subtleties were lost on most of us. I believe Tully made a brief foray into my bed tonight but Marin discovered her and brought her back.
The crossword puzzles came out and helped highlight another odd difference in British vs American English. Gemma, who is bravely tackling US crosswords, asked for help with the clue, “Happy as a _______”. I answered, “clam.” Gemma said, “Really?! You don’t say ‘lamb’?”
So, the Brits are apparently as happy as lambs, gamboling in fields and prancing about on clover. We in the US, meanwhile, are happy as bivalves, sitting on the bottom of the ocean, waiting to be eaten by octopuses or dined on by seals and other merciless predators. Whose idea was that, anyway? Did someone just mishear “lamb” at some point in the distant past and somehow turn the tide of happiness for all of us? How do these things happen?
Joe looked up the answer in the back of the crossword book and it was “lark.” Hopefully they are birds living in a state of ecstasy. I think I’ll just go on believing that. At least the originators of that simile set the bar for happiness higher than the sea floor.
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