Day 6: Puff Visit

4/22/2010, Thursday, 1700 Zulu, Lat. 18 43.7 N, Long. 083 01.2 W, Day 6

Yesterday the wind completely shut down at 1100 and we motored for 8 hours using up precious fuel. The sea was so calm; it was like gliding on a piece of glass. Terry, in desperation, was suggesting we should offer my bottle of SMS to please the Wind God. He was serious. It took me a while to convince him that the Wind God is a member of AA and had quit drinking many years ago. Whew!

At lunch, we had an unexpected visitor, a yellow warbler of some sort. Dead tired sitting on the port lifeline and wouldn’t move. Took him or her (not familiar with avian gender) a couple of hours to rest and then it started to make himself at home on our head, shoulder, arms. Terry fed him some water and I gave him some of my lunch corn chips. I am sure he is from Mexico. After we fed him, he started to fly around and landed in the salon and at one time at the computer keyboard. Terry was sure he was sending out e-mails to all his friends to fly over to Living Water for fresh water and corn chips. He spent the night sitting on our wire fruit basket in the galley and nestled his head on his shoulder with all his feathers puffed up and slept until 5:30 this morning. I took a good picture of him and he left without saying goodbye. Terry had named him “Puff” for his puffing feathers and was disappointed to find he was gone without saying adios….well, so much for the bird story.

Dinner last night was Linguine with Calamari and Clams with Garlic, Butter and Wine sauce. One of the first Italian recipes I learned and developed many years ago.

The wind came up right after dinner at 1900 and we took out the “genie” and were doing over 6 knots. The wind was coming almost on our starboard beam and we were going down the track onto Yucatan Channel which is only about 280 nm away. The wind has come as predicted in the weather forecast and it stayed up to 12 knots. We sailed throughout the night and went to bed happy as clams.

Wind continuous at 10 knots this morning and at 0900 Terry put up the whisker pole and we are now going wing-on-wing, i.e. putting the Genoa on the opposite direction from the main sail. That way we can sail further down wind and make our track. It picked up another ½ kn. of boat speed with that set up. Life is good for a sailor when there is wind.

Thank you Mike, Mary and Andrew for the Galveston lyrics. Terry is learning to play guitar but the one on the boat was so warped sitting in the tropics that he ended up throwing it away. He has another one in storage in San Diego. The chord changes are for him. I will have Terry singing Galveston with me before we get there. He is very shy about his singing but, if I can convert him into an SMS drinker, I think it’s worth a “shot” to turn him into a chorister.

Thank you all for all the kind e-mails. The way Sailmail works on the boat is, we have to store up all our e-mails in a transfer file and will send out everything via SSB (Single Side Band) Radio. Terry, of course has to tune up the right frequency and select the station that has the strongest signal and send out our package and receive any incoming message at the same time. It is quite laborious. That’s why I don’t reply to you individually; otherwise, he will be at the radio all day long. I woke at 0300 this morning and he had already saved 8 e-mails from you guys. He was teasing me that the SSB antenna was so hot that it glowed in the dark all night just to receive all my incoming. But, luckily, some of my e-mails were directed to him.

We are anticipating more wind the next few days and things will get more bouncy around the boat. The good news is we can be home soon. Almost pass our ½ way mark.

Our 24 hours noon-to-noon run is 144 nm. A record so far for this trip

More later….