Day 13: The Good, the Bad, the Dead

The Good: Lots of good to report. Spirits aboard remain high. It's body cleaning day--Windy is washing the girls' hair as I type. We've been smelling pretty ripe. I plan to go on deck later and take a proper salt water shower. We're looking forward to a Thai peanut curry dish tonight, with brown rice and fake meat. Found some additional frozen bananas at the bottom of the freezer, so chocolate-banana smoothies are still on the menu. Windy was looking for something in the nether reaches of the forward hanging locker and came across the long-lost bag of 6 pounds of non-spaghetti pasta (I don't know if she found what she was looking for in the process, but that's how it goes).

The Bad: The first reefing line broke sometime during Windy's watch early this morning. It's a pretty heavy line (7/16"), so I was surprised. It broke right where it does a 180 degree bend through the reefing clew. There was no sign of chafe, but it's a high-stress point and the line is probably pretty old. Fortunately, it broke only a foot away from where the bitter end attaches to the boom, so it was easy to pull in the slack and reattach. I fear my computer is on its last legs. It's doing weird things, like the previous one did just before the mother board gave up the ghost. Before writing this post, I finished backing up everything to an external hard drive. This computer isn't even two years old, but it is a cheapo. We've not seen the sun or stars for the past few days, nothing but overcast skies in this gloomy ITCZ. It will be a thrill to emerge from the far side of this. And we've been moving pretty slow in lighter airs. It will be this time tomorrow before we're at the halfway point of this passage (in terms of distance).

The Dead: Daily we meet the foggy gaze of one or more unfortunate fish on deck. Eleanor noted that it's natural selection in reverse. Most of the flying fish we've seen on this trip don't soar more than 2 or 3 feet above water. But these super-able flyers who successfully rise to the level of our deck, die.

--MR

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com