Robinson - Day 4: Generator Day

As predicted yesterday, today was the day of generator repair. Quite a simple job if you have the water pump on your work bench on land, exchanging the impeller while surfing at 8 kts, hanging upside down in a hot and small engine compartment is a different cup of tea. Light, working position, ability to get your hands on the bolts, etc is all much more 'interesting' the way we had to do this simple job. Nevertheless, within an acceptable time frame of 1,5 hours the generator was smoothly running again. From now on we will take more precautions to make sure we don't let the pump run dry any more. All good now, batteries full and fresh bread in our automatic bread baking machine. For those of you unfamiliar with this device: you throw 1/2 a liter of water and bread mix in and push the start button. Some mixing and grinding later, the machine starts baking and within 3 hours you can enjoy freshly baked bread! Quite amazing, comfortable and easy, I must say..

After noticing that the lee sheet of Robby, our Parasailor was slightly damaged from chafe, we brought it down for some added protection. Since then we have sailed under normal trade wind sail set-up. This costs us approximately 1 knot of speed on average, but does make sleeping a hell of a lot more comfortable.. Tomorrow morning we plan to go to a scheme of sailing 'Robby' during the daytime and changing to a slightly slower, but therefore more comfortable set-up with white sails for the night.

The effects of our actions and choices are by now closely monitored by comparing our own position and progress to that of about 50 relevant fellow participants. We get all positions in an email every day and use those to fill an Excel-sheet, which in turn gives us information on our relative progress. With 'Robby' hoisted, we seem to catch up with boats ahead and we are quite curious whether our new tactics will also prove to be fruitful.

Finally we started fishing today. Don't think too much of this, as it consists basically of towing a long line along with a hook attached to it. Probably we can do with some more experience in this department. Luckily we have all the time we need to build up this experience, so hopefully we will land at least one nice fresh fish during this crossing. It would for example be nice to be able to call day 5 'Fish Day'. We'll keep you posted!

PS. Linda, there were about 100 dolphins with us at dusk; way too many to greet them all personally. I hope for your understanding. Lof!

Best from all aboard 'Robinson',

Robin, Annika & Bojan