Xenial - Day 16 - A (stereo)typical day at sea

We had a good day yesterday, and at midday we received confirmation that in the past 24h we had covered 184nm. Not bad!

The day felt like a stereotype of most of our days onboard. Bobo came on deck at 8am to relieve the last nightshift, and made himself a nice cup of Earl Grey, with milk obviously. Ulrik cut his daily grapefruit and is bravely making his way through a large pot of boat made yogurt. He then started messing around with the plotter to create all kind of views with radar overlays, wind and rudder angles and so on. Gustaf enjoyed a breakfast of cornflakes, with a side of two slices of bread with butter and the famous orange jam (more of a main than a side of you ask me).

The sun was out (but with the occasional cloud to give us some welcome shadow) and the sea was as calm as it has been up to now, so we decided to make the most of it.

I have been building up one of the worse tans ever for a woman, with tshirt and shorts on at all times. So I decided to bring out one of my swimsuits (thank you Beata and Helena for the gift earlier this year), get some sunscreen on and try to fix this tan. It will be however impossible to beat the nice color the president of the sun tanning club has got. Bobo just sits in the aft shirtless listening to his podcast and keeping an eye on the steering wheel for hours a day. He has an unbeatable tan.

Ulrik is also working on his tan, and is listening to a gripping podcast about crime in Sweden. Seems like it was recommended by Bobo, who listened to it on his way from Laredo to Portimao.

CJ spends equal time on podcasts and reading, currently focused on the latter. Yesterday he finished Utvandrarna (and we are all glad that our Atlantic crossing is going better than theirs) and started on Invandrarna. Why is he reading this Swedish classic you may ask? Because I did (in English) and now he needs to prove he can do the same. He has admitted that he is enjoying it though. Sounds very much like my reasoning to do this crossing!

Speaking of Utvandrarna, Janne constantly listens to music and yesterday was listening to some of the songs from the musical Kristina från Duvemåla. However he is never idle for too long, and likes to get out of the sun, so he took to the kitchen and decided to do something with our apples, some of which were deteriorating. Remember the apple tasting committee and how we decided for both green apples and small red apples? Well, the small red were going quickly, so Janne made apple compote on the fly. We had it at dinner and we all loved it - Janne commented that it's the first dessert we have had on board. True, but most of us are happy with reaching into our chocolate supplies at night.

Gustaf spends most of his day below deck, which is totally understandable as he is the only redhead on board. He is a strong member of the reading club. He is onto his second book, somewhat like me. I am reading Moby Dick, Gustaf a book called Stoner. I hope that is the Swedish title, not the English one (If you don't get this, look up "being stoned" in English, maybe in Urban Dictionary, not sure Merriam Webster has it). If you pay careful attention you will notice that Gustaf falls asleep a few times a day while reading, sometimes catching himself before the book falls out of his hands, sometimes not.

Janne and Gustaf took a break and had the second practical meeting of the fishing committee. They put out a line and returned below deck to resume their normal activities. It was Bobo who raised the alarm when the line seemed to have caught something, and I have never seen all of us respond so promptly and eagerly to a "all hands on deck" cry, not even when we need to quickly adjust our sails. Unfortunately it was a false alarm. No fish yet.

Getting bored with the steady winds, the trimming committee decided to do something about our foresail set up and the spinnaker boom that holds it in place. They needed all winches and Janne found himself in the middle of a strong conflict of interest. The winch on which the fishing line is secured (aka the fish winch) was being closely guarded by Janne, but was needed by the trimming committee. Janne is a member of both fishing and trimming committee, how could he resolve this ethical dilemma? He eventually opted for change and reeled in the line. We did catch some algae and he decided to taste it. Edible but not so good, according to him.

The spotting committee has also been having some fun and often I feel like we are playing the lottery - AIS sometimes doesn't show names but only MMSIs, so you can hear someone at the helm calling out random numbers for someone at the navigation table to look up. I am definitely learning how to count in Swedish! However even when we get the names, some of us (i.e. Major Gustaf) have trouble remembering them and we have made up our own names for our fellow competitors. For example, Saphir af Stockholm has become "Jewelery" boat, which creates a lot of confusion since there are a lot of other boats called "Pearl" something, which also could be classified as jewelery. The funniest of all is the "Cookie" or "Biscuit" boat. There is a boat called Ballerina, and I am told that in Sweden there is a popular brand of cookies by the same name. The highlight of this explanation however was when Bobo told me that, in Swedish, Ballerina also means a person who dances in the ballet. I thanked Bobo for explaining Italian, my mother tongue, to me :) It was however a great way to explain to everyone else what mansplaining means - for some reason we had been trying to translate the word from English to Swedish the other day and could not come up with a good example. This was an excellent one.

We topped off the day by gybing our sails and adjusting our course. The whole operation was carefully laid out, discussed and agreed upon by the sailing committee. Some joked that this was the longest gybe in history but I definitely prefer the planned approach to the "let's wing it" approach. Good thing we gybed before dinner as winds from local squalls would have pushed our course further north, and New York isn't exactly where we are aiming to arrive.

Over and out,
Mavi