High and Low Pressure - Tuesday 9th June
Catmojo
Matt
Tue 9 Jun 2020 10:53
Still heading north and west like the last few hundred miles, trying to find the Right Wind on our giant tacking detour. It's like going all the way to Italy because you fancy a pizza, but without the nice weather advantages. It's quite cold with rain showers here on the edges of some Low.
The sails billow and the wind blows when the rain comes over, Sam is a fine fellow who comes out to help rip at lines, Ampi and Anna prefer to stay below and hide under pillows, the radar shows the rain as yellow as it comes towards us, and I've run out of relevant words including "low".
Anna made some giant Dutch pie thing yesterday, possibly like Cottage Pie in the UK, but with a lot more cheese of course. Very good stuff, and it's all gone.
From yesterday, it turns out that the boat ahead of us wasn't an enemy starship after all, although Sam put the us all on High Alert DefCon1 just in case. We chased up behind them at 10knots, the beanbags fell off the mantlepiece (the bit of the cockpit just above the patio doors, you know) and Sam announces that They're Shooting At Us! But the boat was a Gibsea475 called TacumIV with a French family on board. We waved for pictures and chattted on VHF - they're thinking about maybe NOT going to Horta with restrictions etc and pressing on towards Gibraltar instead.
Anna has recovered from her seasickness, and we made sarcastic comments about her jumping her own queue to consult herself as a Doctor. Sam is snoozing better in the saloon but has gone for a more lively top-up snooze in his flight simulator cabin. Ampi gets lots of Hola etc messages, in Spanish.
The card games are still going stronger than ever, and they're more high pressure, not low pressure like the grey weather. We all try maximise the pressure as someone is about to win, in the hope that they'll fluff their out-shot and say Nurdle or Drurdle in the wrong place, or forget to say it when they should. Sam forced Anna into mimicking him by saying "Nurdle" in a silly voice. Another time I said AND!??? quite loudly, which also forced her to say er Nurdle? - another penalty haha. Anna says the sailing is ok but the cards are quite high pressure, arg! But then lots of people have a CV which says they can "work well under pressure", don't they? When interviewing potential new staff I often quizzed them about it if they used this hackneyed phrase. "Now, it says here in your otherwise very impressive CV that you are good at working under ... PRESSURE!!!" and SHOUT the final word "pressure" which made them jump. So, not THAT good at working under pressure then, hm?
We're getting lots of messages now, so Thanks! to all who messaged us. You can email direct to the boat which is Cat mojo all one word on mailasail dot com. I won't spell it out else it might get expensive spam.
The girls have had more dreams which sounded quite interesting, but then ended up being Private. Huh! I had that dream where I leave my phone in a taxi, which I've never actually done in real life. Another time I had a dream that a stowaway suddenly appeared on the boat. Both these dreams went nowhere, but they did wake me up.
Anna's on early morning watch and told me about a ship doing 20knots coming up behind us. Hm. So I pressed the screen in the saloon to find out some info - and it completely disappeared! Boom! That's him sorted eh? Anna very impressed at very powerful tactical weapons systems on Mojo. It came back though, a few minutes later - we haven't actually sunk a large container ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Or have we? Maybe it was a different ship that came back on the screen? I'll just blame Raymarine, again, might need a software update to avoid destroying AIS targets. Heyho.
From Anna - Een stukje in het Nederlands voor de Nederlandse volgers. Bedankt voor je berichtje S; de sterren zijn prachtig hier op de Atlantische oceaan. Het maakt de, nu iets wat frisse, nachtdiensten aangenaam. Gisteren hebben we met zijn allen de opkomst van de maan gezien om 21:00 uur. Vanaf de oceaan zie je alle op- en ondergangen zoveel duidelijker, heel bijzonder! Morgen zijn we alweer 2 weken onderweg. Op dit moment gaan we richting het Noord-Oosten om daar hopelijk de wind te vinden die ons rechtstreeks naar Lanzerote brengt. Het ziet er eindelijk goed uit. Vanmorgen tijdens mijn watch ontbijt gemaakt voor de crew (pannenkoeken). Een uitdaging als de boot met 9 knopen over de oceaan vliegt. Een vogel met een lange witte staart kwam naast ons achter het hoofdzeil vliegen om op adem te komen voor de rest van de lange tocht naar het vaste land. Het vaste land ligt nu ongeveer op 618 nautical miles van ons verwijderd (the Azores). Wij moeten nog zo ongeveer 1370 nautical miles voordat we Lanzerote bereiken. Ik gok nog ongeveer 10 dagen, maar dat hangt natuurlijk af van de wind.
In mijn laatste tekst schreef ik dat er een time-limit zat op het sturen van berichten. Nederlandse tijd komt nu dichterbij dus 10AM tot 8PM (Nederlandse tijd) is ook goed. Super fijn om berichten te ontvangen na 2 weken geen contact met andere mensen dan de crew. In deze tijd een uitdaging, maar ook wel fijn om totaal offline te zijn voor een paar weken. Bedankt voor het lezen en bedankt voor jullie berichtjes.