careful, there might be rocks

What a day.

We enjoyed watching lots of flying fish zooming around and a seabird chasing our lure. A couple of small whales swam with us for hours. After a nice breakfast and more downwind sailing the wind calmed down in the afternoon and we decided to drop the sails and go for a swim.
The water was warm and the visibility unbelievable. We had some fun with the still rigged spinnaker pole ripping us out of the 10000 ft deep water.
The gennaker was hoisted and we sailed into the sunset in the mild breeze. The wind should pick up soon and we will continue to chase high etmals.
Until then, we are enjoying the peace and quiet as well as Max’s exquisite music collections. Soon the Red Hot Chilli Peppers will take over…

Our etmal was 162nm.

PS:
A woman walks into a bar and orders a water. The bar tender points a gun at her and thenks him and leaves. What is the story?

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Christmas Rappin

The venison Christmas meal last night turned out very well. We then opened the Christmas Box, the Captain had packed in Lanzarote, to find a collection of Christmas cookies and started looking for Christmas music – just to realize that none of us had brought any. So, Kurtis Blow’s Christmas Rappin had to do the trick.
The little foldable Christmas tree with blinking lights served as he disco ball (MC Lolo would have been proud).
The already long debate about the Yankee Swap rules continued until lunchtime today. We concluded after having finished an extensive bacon, eggs, cheese, potato brunch to add rolling dice and rock/paper/scissors to the swap to mix it up a little.
While Josh won rolling the dice and therefore first pick, Jake taught us how to get into the opponent’s head and successfully taking Ben’ pick, defending himself from the toxic green clouds emanating from the Hyperdino box; a lemon intended to complete the gin tonic set didn’t take the journey so well.
The crew wasn’t short on gift ideas. And the only tears shed, were tears of laughter. This photo was taken with the captain’s new Yankee Swap lens for his iPhone.

For dinner we dug out the kangaroo meet and were pleasantly surprised.

Our etmal today was again 165nm (exactly the same as yesterday) We are past the half-way point now and are counting down he miles.
The wind continues to blow from the north east and temperatures have reached 25C/80F. Life is still good, very good.

Merry Christmas

A Merry Christmas to you all!!

from a place far away from snow and Christmas trees

Ben eats toe nails

Someone finally caved today and had his first shower, manicure and pedicure. Only 19 nails were accounted for… On a completely unrelated note, Ben found something crunchy in his cheese. And, we saw a barrel floating by.

In addition to the usual perfect wind and weather news, these are the main highlights for today. The mood is still very good and we renewed our Sherry donation to Neptun to continue on this perfect path.

As we have our first Christmas meal tonight, New Zealand veal, red cabbage and potatoes, we had a light breakfast and snacks for lunch.

The wind calmed down a little and we added the main in 2nd reef to the poled out genoa.

Our etmal for today was 165nm.

Merry Christmas to you all!

Dolphins are cool

We are still enjoying our very fast downwind runs despite the extreme rolling and noise inside the boat. While sleeping in these conditions is very hard, we are getting better at it.

Chef Ben continues working miracles in the kitchen. We had eggs, cheese, avocados and tomatoes in the morning, lots of Spanish cheeses & sausages for lunch and steak for dinner. Hilla’s “Rumkugeln” rounded off the meal plan.
We are surprised that we only just finished our first 5 gallon water canister (20l) after exactly one week on the ocean and not much more. Equally surprising is the fact that we did not drink any coffee at all yet. Instead we drink about 4 liters of juice a day.
While we through most trash over board, we keep all plastic and other non degradable items and just filled our first trash bag completely (so, no problem finding space for the remainder of the trip).
Highlights (next to perfect wind & weather and increasing temperatures) were the dolphins that visited us just before sunset. They were relatively small buggers and quite active (a pod of about 10).
We by now know how to identify some of the main stars for astronavigation (Sirius or Betelgeuse, for example ) but still have no clue what to do with that knowledge.
Due to a lower than expected battery charge we investigated the batteries and wiring before pulling the hydro generator in. That was a good call as it had wrapped itself around the towing line and, going backwards through the water had almost chafed the line through. We fixed the line and the generator is cranking out between 4-8A now. We hope that this will help charging batteries, but are not sure yet.

As we can only send three photos at a time, here are a few impressions of week1:

Our etmal was 172nm and we sailed our first 1000 nm by now!

PS:
Would you rather fight a duck the size of a horse or a thousand duck-sized horses?

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Rocking on

More blue water, more downwind sailing, more large waves and more blue skies – awesome sailing! Due to the high winds and poled out genoa, no fishing for a while.

Bacon&eggs, sandwiches; we’ll have salmon for dinner. But first, the next bag of Hilla’s cookie with a cup of malted wine.
For Ulf, and others that might be thinking we are on a Disney cruise for seniors (given our frequent naps, focus on food and the fact that we are covering our legs with blankets (foul weather gear jackets) during rain showers), we are not playing Bingo on this cruise yet. 😉

Highest etmal so far: 176nm (we expect to hit the 1000nm marker late today)

Below are a couple of impressions of the first 1000 miles:

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Chasing the dub

Our quest to make it further West got a little more challenging today. First,
The wind turned further East and therefore made it impossible to hold the course to our imaginary waypoint at 260. We jibed as very large dark clouds with electric charges moved toward us, but could not get much closer to our target direction.
We therefore dropped the main and fully unfurled the genoa, hoping to get closer to 260. After pushing the genoa out to starboard with the whisker pole, we managed to get there and also stabilized the boat.
We made it through the first dark clouds in about 25kn, but ended up breaking the pole under the next set of clouds.
We recovered the pieces and set the spinnaker pole instead. Since then we have a great time surfing the waves with speeds between 7 and 11knots.
The dark clouds moved on and we are sailing under blue skies with a few clouds here and there.
After a little more than five full days on the water, we are starting to sort out some of the carrots and oranges that are no longer good. We finished all bananas and grapefruit and the focus is now on eating avocados and tomatoes before they turn bad.
We had müsli with fruit in the morning, sandwiches for lunch and pork with peppers, onions and those awesome small Spanish potatoes for dinner (and of course some of Hilla’s Christmas cookies: “Spritzgebäck”)

One of the highlights of the day was a breaching whale that was almost completely airborne and not far from us. We learned a lot about demolition derby and sailed and Etmal of 147nm.

The stars are again unbelievable!

Straight outta Tioga

We are considering throwing the GPS over board as we proudly shot our first noonsite with the sextant and ended up only a few miles off (9nm in latitude and 17nm in longitude)
We pulled the hydro generator out and set up our fishing gear. The pink wobbler is working hard but has not yet caught a fish. We had sandwiches for lunch and enjoyed the sunshine. It is getting warmer.
As the wind shifted to the right and calmed down, the gennaker came out and helped push us forward.
When Hilla’s next bag of Christmas cookies came out and we heated up some malted wine with Amaretto our new crew member (“Gingerbreadman, or Lebkuchenmann”) showed up in style… he properly dismembered and devoured.

Max cooked us a nice Thai curry wih banana and the sunset was impressive. Soon the gennaker will come down and we prepare for the night.

Our Etmal today was 151nm.
We are 4 for 4 for great sailing days so far.
All are still unbathed but some changed some of their clothes by now;-)

And,
Did you know that the closest star is 4.2 lightyears away, or that the milky way contains 100-400 billion stars?

What does it all mean?

Another night broad reaching under a sky with way too many stars to recognize most constellations was followed by a beautiful sunrise.
Ben prepared an eggs with tomato and avocado on bread breakfast late in the morning.
In the afternoon, we finally opened the first bag of Hilla’s (Max’ mom) Christmas cookies, Betmänchen”. They were outstanding. Thank you, Hilla!
The question on where that name comes from was added to our list of questions that we cannot answer out here.
As with any other of our long distance sails, we quickly get into all kinds of questions and often do not have the answers to them. Topics today circled around rainbows (how many can you have in parallel, why are they black&white at night, why is the color sequence reversed on the next rainbow…), creation of stars, how seabirds drink, the reason for all the changes in wind strength and direction, and if things are really random in this world?

For dinner, Ben prepared a Lemon Chicken with cumin seeds meal and as we sailed into the sunset, the first beers came out. Yes, the sea legs are growing.

The hydro generator keeps on generating more power than we can consume and most get hypnotized just watching it doing its work behind the boat.
Temperatures are still mild, we are surrounded by showers here and there (creating a very impressive rainbow) under otherwise blue skies. The sailing is pretty dry now. We saw our first bird today but otherwise no sea life.

Our Etmal today was another 168nm, we almost sailed 500nm in 3 days!

We are 3 for 3 now in terms of great sailing days.

Good-bye Europe

It took us about a day and a half to make it through the Canaries and as it was getting dark we saw fireworks in the distance, managed our way through the last wind shadow of the mountains and were welcomed by a large rainbow in the moonlight (shades of grey as opposed to the color spectrum you see during the day).
We continued reaching West under 2nd reef and a tiny genoa and had a great time throughout the night. Lot’s of extremely bright stars in between the clouds kept us busy finding the constellations we know.
In the morning, the islands disappeared behind the horizon and we enjoyed breakfast under blue skies. The freight train continues reaching West at high speeds.
We had salad for lunch and stir fry for dinner (so are slowly able to cook without getting seasick anymore).
Nobody has thrown up in the last 24 hours, but we are wondering if Max is starting to hallucinate as he starts seeing things …( clouds that look like dogs etc;-). )

Our Etmal was 155nm – which would have been Jake’s winning bid, had he not changed his mind in an evil attempt to cover the low side of the other bids in the last second.

A perfect day on the ocean.