monday 15th pm
Catmojo
Matt
Mon 15 Jun 2020 15:11
Still pootling along, touching a massive 6 knots sog this morning, but mostly under 4knots with much crashing and creaking noises, hard to avoid in these very light winds from astern and lazy 2metre swell. White sails need a bit more than 6knots apparent wind to fill properly, so we've been at 110degrees on windvane mode to try make it less crashity. Look, 7 knots of wind, nearly 8... but now it's 6 again.
By 1 o'clock in the afternoon we've done an important 4 miles towards the waypoint in the last two hours, and looks like Nurdle Drurdle is the afternoon activity. Now they're taking the crashy mainsail down cos it's making too much noise and might let us go more downwind. Mondays are always quite busy, I find.
Big shout for Amanda on Arctic Flame, who has many years experience of identifying the best/worst arrival dates for me on eastbound Moj'transat sailing trips. She advises that we should arrive Lanza on 21st or later to avoid any quarantine issues. Roger Wilco Mandy, and quite easily at this rate. Good news for the crew too - no more days and nights of Viking-style paddling with the oars for them while I hammer out the beat on the war drums.
You can contact me/us direct at Catmojo on the mailsail server by the way if you need to send (actually useful+relevant like Mandy's and Simon's) emails, so that James doesn't have to be more Mojo E-postman than is absolutely necessary - he forwards the blog around, but please best don't "reply". Or use IridiumMessaging to message (and sign the message as Flames or whatever) to the satphone on that 8816 number Oh whatever it is.
Also more thanks to Simon our weather guy in UK for extensive weather and other relevant info, and even some jokes too. Very good stuff. Simon says Mr Blue Sky is coming for an ELO day in Blighty. So what do you call a guy doing the vacuum cleaning with the lights off, curtains drawn and a bird of prey on each shoulder? Hawk-kestrel Man-hoovers In The Dark.
Finally, I deleted all the messages on the satphone. I thought it would delete only the "sent" ones but they've all gone - poof! Oh well, we have to delete them as we go along anyway - the olde-tech messaging software on the satellite phones can't hold unlimited messages.