Saturday 29th September

At Sea

19 48.206 S
174 02.774 E (at Midnight)

Happy anniversary Lee and Gaz (did I get the right day?)
A very happy birthday Lorraine, hope you have a good year.

The remainder of the night passed without problem, apart from us both having difficulty sleeping – it must be the excitement of being so close to home – which doesn’t bode well for the remaining 1000 odd miles! I surfaced from my last sleep time at around 08.00hrs and was greeted by a glum faced Gerry;
Him “I think we might have stuffed the generator up again”
Me “what? How?”
Him “well I ran it but forgot to put the blower on”
Me “what damage would that cause?”
Him “well the engine would be running hot so the bearings may need to be replaced”
Me “how long did it run for and was it long enough to do the damage?”
Him “I realized after about 20 minutes and turned it off and now I’m waiting for it to cool down and then I’ll try running it again and see what happens”
Me “Oh”
At this point the conversation stopped, you’ll notice how restrained I was – didn’t shout and call him names as he would have done if it had been some blonde, half witted scatterbrained female that had made the “mistake”. In fact I think I deserved a medal for not laughing out loud or making snide jokes about it; I might be a little scathing in the retelling of the conversation but hey I’m not stupid I know how much I can milk this “mistake” for; the diamond is now the size of a football! Once the generator had cooled down Gerry started it up again, sure enough there is a strange noise that wasn’t there before – thank goodness we are experts at removing and replacing the generator – and we have just one more place to take it apart before we reach Australia and that would make it almost every place we have stopped in the thing has needed attention! We got on with the day’s sailing after breakfast, the sun was shinning the wind was blowing 17 – 18 knots and we were breezing along very nicely. I put the fishing line in the water and that’s where it remained all day – didn’t get a single bite. In the late afternoon Gerry decided to take the casing off of the generator and see if he could locate the strange noise, he reappeared on deck holding a handful of mess which he said was part of the sound deadening material- the glue holding it in place had apparently melted when the generator heated up and it had become stuck in the motor – this apparently was the cause of the noise. Hopefully Gerry has managed to get it all off of the motor and there won’t be any other repercussions from his momentary lapse of reason. Nothing else startling happened all day and we began our night watches as usual, the wind picked up at night and we hurtled along reaching speeds over the hull speed of the boat for almost the entire night but as the swell was small it was still pleasant sailing. When I did the stats at midnight we were delighted to find that we had broken our record, we had sailed 191 nautical miles in the 24hr period – smoking! If we could only do the same amount of miles for the rest of the trip we would be there before we know it!