9 March 2010
A busy day for both of us, David putting a chemical weld patch over the tiny hole in the accumulator tank, leaving it overnight to harden. Thank goodness for such an efficient watermaker. We got our tank capacity up to over 900litres. At last we can relax a little. We celebrated with a long shower each and I did a bucket of laundry, but we are still careful not to leave the pump on just in case. Now I felt free to blanch some of our fresh vegetables and freeze them before they went off. A very slow start in light force two to three winds. So much for showing off flying the mizzen ballooner. We were much too much taken up with our water shortage crises to dig it out of the locker. Lady Lisa flew theirs from the very beginning and are now 40nm ahead so it would appear to give a significant advantage. Not wishing to use the engine we drifted most of the first night until we could stand it no longer when our speed dropped below 3knots and were forced to motor sail for the next 6.5 hours until the wind returned and has stayed with us ever since. Last night our second at sea, as the wind increased to force four we gradually overhauled Ronja who had pulled five nm in front during the course of the day and caught up with Brown Eyed Girl and Eowyn. Voyageur seems to have a mind of her own and needs a little coaxing to get going. But it isn't easy to get the sail trim right when you have no electronic wind data therefore David did a very good job indeed tweaking her sails. It is amazing that in such a small space of ocean that we have visual contact with so many other boats. Eowyn were good enough to alert us to the fact that someone from one of two small open fishing boats had tried to board them. So we keep a sharp eye out but saw nothing. With three double handed boats near each other, ourselves, Jeannius and Dreamcatcher we have to look out for each other. By tomorrow I doubt very much that we will see any other WARC boats or any boats for that matter until our landfall in Marquesas.
Susan Mackay