Friday 1st June

At sea

7 53.840 N
79 47.330 W (at midnight)

We woke this morning to torrential rain – not a good way to start on our next leg of the journey home! It was also Friday and as all sailors know you don’t begin a trip on a Friday. So what do we do? – stay in bed or get going. Only one correct answer I’m afraid, we were leaving. So we donned our wet weather gear and thumbed our noses at the superstition, hopefully it won’t come back and bite us in the bum! After listening to the radio scheduled call we dropped the mooring tire and began to
make our way over to the fuel dock to top up with diesel and water, we had to keep circling and doing figure of eights as there was a catamaran on the dock that must have been putting enough fuel onboard for a supertanker. Eventually we got alongside and topped off our tank, filled the jerry cans and topped off our water tanks. Gerry went to the office to pay our bill whilst I got rid of the trash and, as it had stopped raining, began to wipe down the seats and windows. By 09.30 hrs we cleared the dock; heading out through the mooring field we shouted a goodbye to Peter and made our way to the channel. We motored all the way out through the channel and then unfurled the jib and raised the main sail. The wind was light at under 10 knots and the swell was 6 feet with a very long interval so whilst it was comfortable we weren’t going to be going anywhere by just sailing, we had to keep the motor going too. There were plenty of large ships anchored out side of the channel and also making their way into the canal, for those of you who worked for Blue Star Line with Gerry many years ago – we saw the Avila Star in port here, not anywhere close enough to get a picture but she was there. As we continued on we managed to sail for some of the time and motor sailed for the rest, we were surprised by the amount of trash that was floating in the water, by this I mean regular trash not the trees and such like that we have seen before. Just as the sun was due to set we noticed an enormous cloud out to our starboard side, it had pockets in it where the sun shone through and lightening flashed, I said to Gerry that it looked like something that Disney had dreamt up as a ride – it had that sort of look about it. Anyway the sun disappeared behind this cloud and that was the last we saw of it – no decent sun set and definitely no green flash! We prepared a hot meal by heating up some precooked stuff I had vacuum bagged, I wasn’t really up to spending too much time down below unless we wanted puke pie. Following dinner we began our 3 hour shifts for the night. Happily the rain had stayed away for the day but as we went into night the clouds were gathering around us.