From just before our midnight watch last night the engine has been on :0(
The wind direction shifted in our favour towards the end of our watch but then died away to nothing…
On rising this morning around our usual 0730 the sea was flat and silky and there’s no other way to describe it than molten liquid like gold or mercury or something. It’s going to be a hot one!!! It’s 29 in the boat out of the sun, not sure how hot outside!! The engine might be on a while!
We let out a new lure and get a bite around lunchtime. A great biggie. But alas we lose it, the line broke. So what now?! A Paul special home made one of course, see how that goes. Hopefully those big fishies are attracted to hose pipe…?!
Another sail boat is spied by Bernice off the front port side. Transpires it’s a french catamaran as hailing it in English proves fruitless but in French we get a result. Frogs! What can you say!!
The forecast predicts wind around 6pm tonight but nothing transpires. A strange vessel is spotted about 5pm. Big enough to be transmitting an AIS signal but it isn’t. It’s not very clear on the radar either. We finish our 6-9pm watch and it’s been with us the whole time and although we expect it to be long gone by our next watch (3-6am) it’s still there. Which is puzzling as for the 1st 7 hours of seeing it we’re averaging 6 knots and the last 3 the engine’s been off and we’re lucky if we’ve averaged 2 knots yet it remains about the same distance away from us. Bizarre!!!!
The engine actually went off about midnight after a 24hour straight run to give it and us a rest. No one expected it on this long, the wind was supposed to be here by now. :0(
This meant while Paul was on watch it was really noisy with clanging and banging in the forepeak as he attempted to harness what little wind there was. In the end we got up almost 30min before our 3 am shift mostly cause we couldn’t sleep but also because of a recurrent alarm noise that we wondered was causing a different problem.
Our watch was no more comfortable than our inability to sleep. With constant tweaking as again we tried in vane to keep what little wind there was in the sails. The only consolation was a long visitation by a family of dolphins (that we were a bit too tired to enjoy) and the beautiful starry night sky. The moon was nowhere to be seen and only to be 10% anyway. But the stars were shining brightly and would have took your breath away!