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Lydia - Leg 2 Day 7 - Wallow & Stir



A relatively quiet day today. The perfect wind we had yesterday has dropped a few knots below what we'd really like and so the occasional sail slap breaks the tranquillity of our gentle 5 kt passage. The radio round up was not a great success today with the appointed net controller unable to hear many of the other yachts. From what we could hear (and confirmed subsequently by the 1200 positions email we receive from ARC HQ) we're still at or near the front of our Cruising Division B pack.

Lydia's motion continues to test us. As a consequence of it and the fact that the fruit we have suspended from a net in the saloon seems to be shrinking sufficiently to allow some of it to escape periodically and then roll around on the deck. It's amazing how long you can put up with fruit playing saloon deck bagatelle, hoping that it will lodge somewhere, before you are eventually forced to get out of your bunk and retrieve it. The patent pending suspended stable tray that swings wildly over the cockpit table and generally annoys rather serving a useful purpose revealed that, without the addition of some non-slip matting it couldn't be trusted with a brand new plastic container of Hellmann's mayonnaise. It slid off, bouncedonce in the cockpit and once on the side deck before disappearing over the side with a loud 'plop' that was followed by wailing and gnashing of teeth.

We found ourselves with more time on our hands today; a whole hour in fact, as we put our clocks back to reflect our westward progress. So Lydia time is now 2 hours behind the UK. The skipper decided to use the extra time not to low his own trumpet but to rescue it. The trumpet in question is the loudhailer, which should be attached half way up the mast but has, for the last ouple of days, been swinging by a piece of electric string. Swinging marginally less wildly in his bosun's chair the 'lash up' (an elastic bungey rather than claggy black tape this time) and the associated ascent and  decent were achieved by the skipper and the associated halyard and back up team afely and with his dignity intact.

The fishermen made a catch of a different kind today - Sargasso weed! Thankfully an onboard reference book has put us out of our misery and we now know that it probably is Sargasso weed because the Sargasso Sea is to the north of us. In practice we will have travelled down the eastern side of it on our north/south leg, along its bottom edge to the W Indies and if Lydia were to take the classic route back to the UK by crossing back from the eastern seaboard of the USA she would have circumnavigated it. In other words it's 'the bit in the middle' where yachts don't tend to go because  it's out of the trade winds. But eels go there to breed!

Supper tonight was well travelled Lymington Waitrose boeuf bourgignon supplemented by sausages that weren't in the end added because the gas bottle ran out part way through the complicated culinary process of cooking  them. Matthew assures us that the bottle change to a different variant of gas 'will not be a problem'. That said, it seems to require daylight to  achieve it, so post supper coffee and middle watch cocao is off the menu  tonight. Once again it's a hard life - but someone has to put up with it. 


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