About three hours after I posted it stopped raining, the wind stopped as well so we spent the rest of the day drifting. As the sun came up and it grew a bit warmer some of us red and half slept inside the cabin and some of us used our small gardena bottle to shower. You can get quite clean and feel a lot fresher only using 5 dl of water. A good thing when we don’t have that big water tanks on Trusty.

Apparently we’re afloat in the middle of the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) fleet, not that we’ve seen anything except for some flying fish (btw we picked up a big one on our deck, pictures coming) and some small birds that zooms around between the waves. The ARC must be more upset than we are right now, they are racing across the Atlantic, they probably go trough 20 sail changes a day trying to sail in the right direction and reef down when the hard winds pass and shake loose their reefs as the wind dies. As long as we’re sailing in the western 180 degrees on the compass we’re quite fine here on Trusty. We need our energy to complain about things, not trying to squeeze 0,3 knots more of the none existing wind. We just change the size of our genua using a furling system depending on the wind strength and let Aries (our self steer) sort the direction out.
The first thing that we can run out of is gas for the stove and about that time i guess it’s our patience that will run out, after that we’re going to be low on candy (going to happen quite close to the gas and patience) and after that water, diesel and last of all corned beef tin-cans tough it might be a tie with the chopped tomatoetin-cans.. So we’re going to have to rely on Portwine, corned-beef and dry bread-crackers to survive on if something happens. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that shall we?

The best feeling right now when it comes to the sailing part of the trip is when the winds feel it’s ok to cooperate, then the rocking slows down, Trusty stiffens up under the sail-pressure and you start to hear the sound of tiny bubbles around her. That occurs between 4,8-5,5 knots and all of a sudden we’re doing 6 knots down wind, picking up speed as we surf along with the waves. It’s a great feeling speeding trough the night with the bioluminessent alge kicking up light patches around and in our wake.
We are almost halfway there and then it’s an other cupcake and we bought some small cava bottles so we have one bottle each to celebrate with (to be popped and consumed when one goes on free watch for six hours) but we haven’t decided if we should celebrate halfway across from the canaries or when we’re in the middle of the ocean. The big bottle of proper Champagne is going to be our anchor drink for when we’re safely moored in a bay next to some palm threes.

My bunk is in the bow section of the hull and that has it’s ups and downs, both literary and figuratively speaking. Waves can make my life fun while trying to sleep, I’ve only slapped my face in the celling once and that was on Biscay but my legs are often experiencing zero gravity as we dive into a valley after passing a big wave. Figuratively it’s good to be away from the kitchen, all the cutlery, cups and pots can make a bit of a noise when we rock and roll all over the place. On the other hand the bow wave is quite loud sometimes and that can be a downside. Most of the time we sleep with earplugs to cut out the sound, at least mentally.We try to wrap towels around plates, cups and pots to stop them from making noise but after a couple of days of Atlantic waves it’s back to the percussion solo in our galley.

Well time to get up into the cockpit and look at an empty horizon for tree hours.