Today it’s raining, not that fun when you’re in a not too big of a boat crossing the ocean. Usually the person on watch can sit out in the cockpit and come in sometimes to look at our small AIS computer but now you don’t want to be outside in the rain so you spend most of your time inside and look out at the horizon once every 20 minute or so.
Crossing the Atlantic during trade-wind season (not that we actually have felt the power of the all mighty trade-winds that much) is not a hard thing to do when it comes to sailing. That’s the easy part, just hoist a couple of cloths above your boat and you’re moving. The real challenge is the waiting game. We’re on day 12 now and we’re not even halfway there, it’s the time factor that’s the hard part, the part where you actually sail the same distance you had coming down to the canaries in one go.

So now we wait and try to make our days go by as fast as possible and there are a couple of ways to shorten the time.
1. Sleep a lot, and then I mean sleep every hour you’re not on watch and/or eating. Works for a while but you tend to get a bit of a headache of to much sleep and not enough water.
2. Read a book. Rather read 20 and than kind of gives you a headache too when your brain has to process the amount of words you fill it with.
3. Games!! Works if the other two are not doing listnumbers one or two. Plus the boredom of knowing all the answers to all the questions in your trivia game because you’ve played it too much.
4. Fun small things to celebrate, like that you saw a wave that looked just like the one in yaws or that that cloud looks strikingly as the ones in Perfect Storm. Brighten up your time with a soda-can, cupcake or a piece of candy.

Yesterday in the evening the wind changed direction and died down and our VMG (speed towards the Caribbean (velocity made good)) dropped way below what’s even remotely funny so we had a party. No alcohol, we just got high on sugar from a soda can each and blasted party music on high volume while we jumped around in the cockpit looking at the dark clouds in the sunset. We had a good time before tucking in for the night (two at a time leaving one lonely person stargazing) and all of a sudden it had become today. Today it’s raining, it’s not that fun, it reminds me of Scotland and we should be listening to steelbands now not a squeeky wersion of Amazing Grace.

But smile, we’re only 1575 miles out from Martinique right now 🙂