It’s been busy few days.
We have been changing sails very often to catch the best wind and make the fastest speed.
Despite our delay at the start we are now less than 900nm to Oban, and probably at the 7th position.
Starting with the wonders of nature; there has been two visits by sperm whales in the last 2 days, one which got pretty close, probably to less than 10 meters. We were then escorted by a group of dolphins who came to play with us for few minutes. I was wondering whether they were challenging us for a race. We have had then repeated visits from dolphin flocks. One thing I found very curious is the birds that are flying around us. There certainly is no land nearby and I have learned that they fly and rest on the ocean when they need. They either fly in groups of 2-3 or solo. I’ve seen at least one having an orange fur on the chest, I’ll check that up once I’m on the land. Funny enough when we were getting closer the northern ice line (which is the border that we shouldn’t pass), we’ve had a visit from a very weird bird which I suppose was a drone. It was very high above us and was not really flying. We were told that above the northern line there is the us navy so I presume it might be trying to figure out what the heck we were doing at those lines.
Talking about the northern border and icy patches, we believe we saw an iceberg 3 days ago.. at a distance.. we had no clear vision to identify, so we have had to agree amongst us what it is and the final decision was that it is an iceberg. Since I’m the first person to see that I’d like to name it after me :)
Last few days have been very windy and tough to continue a life on the boat. Yesterday it was me and Andre cooking and it was really a hard to stand up day yet to cook but we were able to feed our fellow crew members.. as a bonus, I’ve had the opportunity to sleep until this morning without any watch.. amazing..
Menu was very basic which have helped us as it would be far harder to prepare any other food not coming from tins. We’ve cooked breaded fish for lunch, and stir fry for dinner.
On the sailing side we’ve been changing sails very often in the last few days. Dropping code 1,2 or 3 means a sweaty wooling session for us. As we do not have many space to spread the kite, tack goes into our tunnel, head goes up to the end of the sail locker and clew goes to the other tunnel. Then we need to figure out the sides, it’s the red line between clew & tack, black line between clew & head and it is the numbers side between head & tack. Once this is set, two people facing each other start rolling the kite on 2 sides and depending on the size of the kite we tie one or two wools in every 2-3 feet. Which in fact is a very sweaty activity at the middle of the night. Imagine doing it for few times. Since weather has been a bit rough and stormy, we are back to white sails now, so no kite wooling in the last few days.
Now the time for lunch so I’m stopping now :) it’s been a while when I started writing today’s blog and now finishing at 8th July, 12:14 boat time.
I’ve chatted to Ella this morning about our position, weather and arrival time. She doesn’t see a good opportunity to arrive before the 14th.
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