Cooking at 45 degrees

We are used to cooking at an angle when the boat is healing, but this time it was 45 degrees Celsius…

Leg 7 Day 17 (Seattle to Panama) – Tuesday 15/05/2018

The day after my Bistro watch. I had an amazing long sleep in the sail locker. The code 1 bunk was free and the hatch open. It was nice and cool (relatively) and the air was fresh. In the accommodation tunnels it is now not only hot (around 40 degrees Celsius) but also smelly as everyone is sweating in their sleep (and when they don’t sleep). 

It is 10am now, I’m off watch and wonder if I should take a shower. It will cool me down a bit, but sweating will return in minutes – so the value of the shower would be higher in the late afternoon. 

The winds have dropped more over the last days and we are currently heading inshore again in the search for some sea breeze. Unfortunately, over the last couple of days other boats have passed us and we have fallen back to sixth position. However, the top 6 boats are all within 8 nm – so this is anyone’s race (other than Liverpool’s as the are still around 240 nm behind). 

We also passed the first mandatory finishing gate. There are 6 finishing lines and the race director decides which one will be used. This depends mainly on the progress of the fleet and the expected arrival time to Panama. 

So hopefully we can win a few places back, when it counts. 

We are still near the coast of Mexico and you realise how big this country really is. 

On the topic of sea life, sightings of dolphins become more regular. Yesterday the was a large group of them about 2 miles from the boat doing high jumps out of the water. It looked like they were forming a circle, which might indicate a hunting behaviour – or it was just for fun. Anyhow, is was amazing to see them leaping about 2 meters out of the water and splashing back in on their side. 

A couple of days ago, I had to go up the mast to sort out the spinnaker halyards after a peel and at exactly that time a small group of dolphins came by. It was an amazing to see them from aloft. You see much more of them and an appreciate how the swim together and dive down quickly ; swim away from the boat and then come back. They also shit in the water, no matter if one of their mates is swimming behind them…a very questionable approach for an intelligent life form in my view. 

Anna, our mate, has become or valuable tactician and being competitive as she is (especially towards ‘Dare to Lead’ where her buddy Dale is skipper) she keeps the boat moving well. 

It seems my project management skills have taken over a bit, as I I have brillant ideas how to make some evolutions (I especially like Spinnaker peels) more “efficient”. It’s a lot of lines – and to use an (amended) quote from my friend Stefan, who is work no a lot with audio equipment, ”yes i know what all these lines are for and yes i know when to pull them. No, you can’t today I them!”

Today, we plan to have a chat at lunch time (we don’t call it brown bag lunch, as our little brown paper bags a our poo bags) about a few evolutions and issues we have a the best ideas to solve those. 

Mentioning poo bags – this seems to become the leg where we talked the most about the use of the heads and where to put your (used) toilet paper as parts of the crew seem not to get it. You always wonder who it might be, as you can’t imagine any of your loved crew not to get it…

And finally just a quick recap of yesterday’s mother watch with Carsten. The expectations are now always high and Carsten started in a bad mood as there was only one bread for both watches. But it all went well and we even had some left. So with a change of mood, we started to change the menu and Carsten decided to do another of his famous soups. I decided to make some bread treats, starting with an onion bread. For which i started frying onions already at breakfast. While doing this the idea came up to make more bread and put some garlic in — this become a focaccia with black olives and basil and rosemary on it. This worked perfectly in the evening with the onion, carrot and sweet potato soup. Most of the preparation happened in the morning and the last hour before lunch I quickly made the risotto which was on the menu for the day. All in all everyone seemed to be happy as we didn’t had many leftovers and (second kpi) hardly anyone used any condiments. 

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