Wednesday 4th July

At Sea

5 43.030 S
121 59.568 W (at Midnight)

Happy Independence Day to all our American friends, enjoy the fireworks – we will be missing them!

After spending the night roaring along with wind gusts up to 22 knots it came as a bit of a shock at 05.30hrs when the wind died away to nothing and we were gently moving along at much slower speeds. Gerry shook the reef out of the main by 06.00hrs and we picked up a little speed. I haven’t mentioned fish patrol for a couple of days as we hadn’t found any on deck but today we found 2 flying fish, it would appear that we have gone away from the area where all the squid were as we haven’t had any of them land on the boat for days now. Whilst Gerry was out on deck shaking the reef out of the main a flying fish went hurtling past his chest, some of them really get quite high when they hit the right wave. The radio schedule at 07.00hrs told a similar story for 3 of us, only Timella had spent the night wallowing around doing 2 knots, they are now something like 800 miles behind us – theirs is going to be a very long, slow trip. Once the radio schedule was done Gerry took over babysitting George and I went back to bed to try and catch up on the night’s lost sleep. I had been in bed for less than 10 minutes when I heard Gerry yell in an excited voice, "Nick, Nick, there’s a ship out here".
It goes to say something of our frame of mind that we got excited about another ship; I got up to check he wasn’t hallucinating (after all we are talking about the man who tells me he sees lights on the horizon, the fishing line in the water trailing behind us and pigs flying overhead – none of which are possible but we do check carefully for the pig droppings on the boat in the morning – wouldn’t want to step in that!) Sure enough there was a container ship off our starboard bow 3 miles away heading north. Gerry was so excited he took a photo to prove he wasn’t going insane; he also thought that he should let Cameron on Timella know as the ship was heading his way but that could wait until the evening radio schedule as it was unlikely that the ship would get to where Timella is before then. I went back to bed and slept for an hour then it was time for breakfast and the routine stuff. We made water under sufferance, it really is a pain but what other option is there? Following lunch Gerry went to bed for the afternoon leaving me to watch over George, the wind for the day stayed consistently high and we raced along doing between 6.5 and 8 knots all day, it wasn’t the most comfortable ride but at least we were moving along! The other thing of note for the day was that we had passed into the next time zone though we haven’t put our clocks back yet as not all the boats are in the new time zone as yet. I decided to celebrate Independence Day with a good old fashioned meat loaf followed by apple pie, cooking it was an effort and a half as we were rolling around all over the place but cook it I did and we had a very enjoyable dinner watching the sun go down. I still haven’t managed to see the green flash, almost every night the sun goes down behind a wall of cloud, it doesn’t seem to make any difference that the sky has been cloudless and blue all day, as soon as it’s time for the sun to set the clouds appear on the horizon and stay with us until sun rise the next day. We did contemplate letting off a flare in lieu of fireworks but having seen the ship this morning we re thought the idea, the last thing we need is a search and rescue party coming out for us. Once dinner was over and done with it was time to try and sleep not that it was going to be easy, it was hard enough hanging on never mind sleeping. Just before Gerry went down for his first attempt to sleep we put the reef in the main as the wind speed was increasing and we were racing through the water at nose bleed speeds again for the second night in a row. I think that between us we probably managed a total of 4 hours sleep for the entire night, the plus side to that was that we had another good day as far as miles goes – we did 159 mile up until midnight which is pretty good going. Who needs sleep anyway?!