Flying fish, landing Boobies and sail mending
How to sum up a day at sea out on an ocean crossing. Maybe flying fish, landing Boobies and mending sail is the best way to describe it! Oh and food, lots of nice food!
The last few days we have been surrounded by Masked Boobies that are hunting the flying fish around the Tecla. The flying fish jump or fly out of the water because they think we are chasing them, but then in the air awaits the real problem, the masked Boobies. Sometimes they skim the water chasing the fish, other times they bomb dive, like their Northern family the Gannet, and come up with a mouth full of fish.
One of the Boobies tried to land on the jib boom, but found out how slippery that is with all the salt spray and beautiful Epifanes two component varnish. They don’t give up easily though.. so we had a bit of a show just before dinner.
Other then that, there has been some sowing of the mainsail. Tinke has become quite the expert in the herring bone stitch and has been showing it to Maartje (picture of the day by Tinke of Maartje mending the sail). Small repairs that are easily done with the mainsail on the deck. Some repairs are just old wear and tear, others are because of chafing on the rigging. Hopefully all will be done before entering Hawaii, so we can get this sail back up before we set sail on the next leg. Other small jobs on deck are greasing, oiling, de-salting etc. Tomorrow we start on the port side sail winch, cleaning and putting it back together.
Other then that, we have been making good progress. Averaging 8,5 knots, we have been eating away at the miles to go. Just 630NM left until the harbor of Honolulu. The wind has turned into the North East corner and is blowing at a good trade wind strength, around 20 knots. The weather is fair, in the morning we had some cloud cover, which was nice for the temperature. But just before 12 it went very sunny! The temperature has been dropping though and so during the night watch we are all in at least sweaters!
All well on board, Jet.
