Hello from way in the mid Atlantic by the wonders of young Mr Marconi's new radio telephony.
We are slowly tacking our way north eastwards towards the Azores. We are about 750 miles SW of them. The wind is dead on the nose so its painfully slow. Fortunately not horrible weather though, just slow. May have to throw the horses overboard. I've starting practicing for this already but using cockroaches and tea bags as we are great friends with the horses now. Not so with the goats as their butts are very annoying.
Hopefully we will get to the island of Faial (wasn't he deposed and shot?), capital Horta, in about a week to stock up on salted weevils, barrels of brine, hard tack, and tallow. We'll leave there heading North towards Ireland, a 1200 mile trip of about 10 days.
Every morning, Dave dons his ancient medieval red Doge-hat (as in Venice) and sets the fishing line astern trailing its pink plastic squid-skirt lures. This only seems to bring on squalls & rain. Certainly no tuna or marlin. The sea herabouts seems only populated by Portuguese Men-of-War jellyfish. Large pink jobs with errect sails and huge long near lethal tendrils. Probably not a good area for swimming.
Although we're only at 30's latitudes, the stiff easterlies mean it's chilly at night and early morning and for the first time in a year the heater has been brought into life. Skipper's blood certainly has become thin.
Using our shore weather support and occasional snatches on radio of Herb, the weather guru, we are trying our best to work our way North and East, but our progress to the Azores has been drastically slowed by consistent easterlies on the nose, and we have had to continuously revise our planning dates.
Alas, 2-handed sailing, and its alternating 3 hour watches, does not give much whalebone carving time, but we do lighten the day by inane conversation and entirely forgettable philosophising. The sort of mental and verbal rubbish you might expect an engineer and a medical man to trade in. With David's dictionary we also dabble haltingly in the old home tongue, and yesterday translated 2 filthy jokes and the whole of Ozymandias into our best school Irish and thought ourselves the bees knees. Skipper's mixed music machine is now allowed to play daily, although David winces visibly and goes into hiding at the sounds of Dylan or Black Sabbath. He nods approvingly to that Wagner chap's opera and its nehbehlungs (sp?) and chuckles to Mozart.
Now out of mainland bread we have been baking with excellent results, and may even diversify later into pastries and other delicacies. We are already making the paper doylies.
Monty the Monitor wind vane has at last been called into service after being sidelined for misbehaviour last year. Despite a severe battering against the wall in St Barts, he is now performing very well. One advantage Monty has over Ray, the electronic autohelm, is that he naturally exploits windshifts and will follow any changes that will allow us to claw our way north easterly.
When the skies are clear, we are lit by Venus shine and phosphorescence, while above us there is an unbelievable cloud of stars of every colour and type. Don't know what it all means. Must get a star map and learn some of this stuff.
Ho hum. Time to get back on watch and carry on the uphill crawl.
Position: 31 North, 40 West. 0530 utc Weds 16th
M & D on R
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