It took us a day and a half too navigate the Canary islands. Shall we go
east west or through the middle and if the latter between which islands
to pass??? Questions which were eventually answered by the weather
forecast: through the islands keeping Gran Canaria on our right and
Fuerteventura on our left. Yesterday evening we reached Lanzarote,
visible through the street lights in the villages instead of the lights
that are on the charts, but we never saw. This morning we had
Fuerteventura already on our left hand side and enjoyed a beautiful
sunrise over the volcanic hills of the island. We managed to keep the
speed and our spinaker up. The wear problems we are having with our
sheets and guys has been tackeled and we can now fly 'the kite' for long
periods on end without having to gybe to swap them. As I am writing this
we are leaving the Canaries behind us and apart from a short dip in the
windspeed things are looking great: we have moved up in the fleet to 2nd
or 3rd place. The sailing is still very interesting with changing wind
speeds and changing wind directions. We are learning how to maximise use
of our heavy weight spinaker so we don't have to use the supersized
light and medium weight ones, which have caused some other boats in the
fleet serious headaches and in one case even serious injury while
unwrapping/cutting it from the forestay.
Unfortunately we had some injury too on the boat. Despite the calm seas
and favourable winds the sea is still unpredictable: at the moment
someone was pooring hot water to make tea one odd wave hit the boat and
our teammate sustained 2nd degree burns on het shoulder. Luckiliy our
two surgeons on board are great with painkillers and we sent the
victim to bed painfree and in a drug haze. She's doing already a lot
better.
Our big shopping operation to supply the boat with food is causing a few
headaches, wind and swift bowel movements: beans for 3 days in a row is
maybe a bit too much... Fortunately we have a number of really creative
chefs on board who manage to make the best food out of whatever we have
lying around as left overs, so we may be able to tackle the 3 day bean
fest in the next rotation of our menu. Today the left over porridge was
turned into a crunchy oats fritter which was a nice desert for lunch.
Evaporated milk with vanilla sugar works well as a replacement of
custard on a crumble, rhubarb juice from a can tastes really good and
there are loads of other things we can do with 'canned stuff'. The next
step would be to use the fresh squid sweepings off the deck. To our
surprise we have found several squid (inktvis) on deck the last few
days. Our deck is about 1.3m out of the water so quite a climb up from
sea level. How do they get on deck? Do they fly? Do the dolphins throw
them at us to make us do tricks?
Sad point to note here is that we have actually seen very few dolphins
'till now and only just this minute spotted our first whale. off for nap
now.
