Day 4: Flying Squid

posted in: Atlantic Crossing II 0

When the sun came up this morning, Mel looked into the front cockpit and saw a new sight: a 6″long squid, dead, resting on the box of spare lines. How it got there is a mystery, as the waves haven’t been bad and they are going downwind. Mel feels sad that the squid version of Wilbur Wright probably worked for months on mastering waving its body just the right way only to break free of the water and encounter a giant Rubbermaid tub between it and its home port during its glorious maiden flight. Yeah. That’s probably what happened.

Not much to report otherwise. Greg had a great birthday dinner and made the kids watch Silverado. Boat school started today with a reluctant half-day. Greg once again worked on the hydrogenerator, addressing the persistent “Generator Connection Error” by replacing the weird, tenuous connector to the controller by just hard-wiring it in, muttering something about non-robust engineering. The error did not go away, but we are getting about 15 amps out of it now, and it’s lasted a whole hour so far!

Boat stuff: 162 nm in 24 hours. Spinnaker is still up. The wind dropped down to just 7-8 knots apparent for several hours yesterday but is back up today to 10-12 kts apparent. We are still heading more south than west than we would like, but if we head right on target the waves rock the boat a lot, so we are keeping the wind angle at 150 for now, mainly for comfort reasons. Every day we move the spinnaker halyard a bit to minimize chafe. All systems (and toilets!) working!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *