Last night I heard a new sound, Trusty out at sea is a cacophony of different sounds and one learns the origin of most of them during a longer stay. As soon as one hear a new sound your mind starts working again, trying to find out what the hell is going on. It could be just a pencil on the floor witch is a none problem or delammination of the hull witch would be something a bit more serious. Mostly it’s just Trusty shifting shape a little because of a different sail-setting or something that has shaken lose of it’s towel wrapping.

This was a scraping sound witch was interesting, scraping sounds are not that common in our little world. I tried to pinpoint it at it came from where we have our closet and toilet area, right next to where the mast pass through. Moving silently toward the sound trying to find it it stopped. Hmm, must be something with the floor I thought and tried to focus my hearing as I moved around little. Nope, still silent..
Walking back toward the kitchen the scraping started again. Now my mind started making up reasons for a scraping sound, did we hit something that is scraping against the hull? Giant squids? Cockroaches? Kraken? I shifted my weight slowly not to disturb the floorboards and swiveled my head to pick up on the direction, looked down and saw a black blob just in front of my feet.

It was a small marine bird. Our floor is a bit slippery and I guess the claws couldn’t get enough traction for the bird to stand up. Also there’s kind of no room to fly in that part of Trusty, it’s small and a bit cramped (still good enough for us) not ideal for getting enough speed to get airborne. So I woke up the whole crew and slowly picked up the bird.

It was black and small and didn’t mind at first, I could feel the heartbeat slow down and as soon as it started to relax it begun picking at my fingers. After no response from me it calmed down again. I carried it out into the cockpit and sat it down on a big flat area. It just sat there for a while and then it flew away into the night.

The odds of finding a fish as well as a bird inside must be fun.
Right now we have 344 NM left until we’re anchored in Cul de Sac de Marin in the southern part of Martinique. The GPS thinks that it might be something between 100 to 85:34 hours to go. We’ll see. If we just get a little bit more wind so we can get at least 1.5 knots out of it the diesel will be enough to get us all the way. Yeeey!