The sailing today was, in a word, Zoom. Zoomy, zoomy, zoom, zoom. Tina clocked us doing over 12knots SOG this morning, but I suspect the GPS was broken. However, solid 8 knots all day for sure.
What else? We smell better.
It was a water making, laundry and showers day today. How do we make water?! We run the generator (burning diesel), which sucks salt water out of the sea and pushes it through a very very fine filter (finer than salt molecules), it spits the extra salty water over the side and spits the fresh water into our tanks. We then use the fresh water to wash clothes, dishes, ourselves and drink – all of which ultimately ends up down the drain and back in the sea. So, in a strange kind of way all the water maker really does is turn diesel into people who aren’t thirsty and smell good. Yay.
Nothing else happened today! Nothing. Well, Tina saw a turtle and cooked dinner (unrelated). Jon caught a Mahi-mahi and watched Iron Man with Teo, Mia finished her book and cooked lunch, Teo did some school and played a math card game with Jon. So basically nothing, the days are starting to run together!
We also joined another fleet of boats! What is a fleet of boats and how do you join it, glad you asked! Basically, there is a nice lady on a boat sailing somewhere between Panama and the Marquesas. Everyday, she collects all the emails she gets from other boats, she gathers together all the details of where the boats are and any interesting news, including weather, fishing, technical problems, what they ate, etc. and then sends a summary back around to the all the other boats.
Well, that is M-Fleet and they are mostly ahead of us. But today we found out about another fleet of many kids boats who are mostly behind us, so from tomorrow we’ll be sending our position to two lists of yacht spread between Panama and French Polynesia. My guesstimate is that there must be about 30 boats between these two fleets and likely the same again which aren’t listed but out there ‘nearby’. So over 50 boats around here somewhere. But there is a lot of somewhere out here.
4000 miles, that’s how far we are sailing. What is 4000 miles? It’s London to India. Oslo to Florida. LA to Japan. Longer than the cape of good hope to cape horn. A lot of somewhere.
But still we were passed last night a British registered super yacht ‘Rosehearty’ – 150ft long according to our AIS and headed the same way, albeit twice as fast. Mia wanted us to call them up and explain we needed Tea and crumpets, and to watch the royal wedding on satellite TV but we didn’t, it was late.
Did I mention that we all feel very lucky to have such good sailing weather? Well well do.