Ya gotta post when you have good interwebs … and not all of us at once.
We are learning as we go.
Here are some snaps from the Exumas.
Sunset at Hawksbill CayHelm duty on the way to Georgetown
Catch up from the exumas
Growing Food on On Delay
I’m getting back to my wanna-be hippy roots and have started growing my own bean sprouts and culturing yogurt.
The initial bean sprout experiment was a success — sprouts sprout twice as fast in the heat of the tropics than in SF.
Jane and her bean sprouts. (Grown in the odd pasta-and-more container left in the galley by the previous owners of On Delay.)
The cupboard above the freezer pump gets very hot — the freezer pump runs a lot keeping our cold food not-quite frozen in the hot weather. Turns out that this hot cupboard is a great place to culture yogurt. Today’s batch was the best yet — made from Chobani Greek yogurt, milk powder, evaporated milk, a pinch of salt and a touch of gelatine.
Yogurt culture cupboard.
Saturday Afternoon on Provinciales
On Saturday, we rented a little car and drove along Provinciales. We drove the highway, the length of the island: first to the end of the road on the east and then in the evening we drove to the end of the paved road on the west.
Here are some pictures from the day:
Banking is such a big deal here; it seemed appropriate to have my picture taken in front of a bank in the fancy shopping district.
Our Route So Far
Recipes Afloat: #1 Cupim com cachaça
An occasional series of practical recipes to cook aboard using the ingredients at hand.
Cupim is the hump of the Zebu cow farmed in Brazil.
Continue reading
Route recap: May
Wednesday May 30th to Thursday May 31st: At sea between Great Exuma and Turks and Caicos
These were our first full days at sea. It took a while to get used to it. We did watches: four hours during the day and three hours at night. This is when it’s great to be a foursome. Cruising couples have to be on watch half the day, we only had to be on watch for a quarter of the day.
Not much to see: In one of my four hour watches, I saw : one flying fish, one small floating plastic item, two spouts from a whale.
A high point was heaving to and going for a midday swim in flat seas, 30 miles from land where the sea was 15,000 ft deep.
Strange Luxury
It’s May 30th and I am on the 19:00-22:00 watch, sailing close hauled (that’s 45 degrees off the breeze in our cat) under a single reefed main and a full jib at 5.8 kts in 10-11 kts of true wind. Seas are calm and we are humming along in light trade winds just after sunset. The radar is on and clear and the AIS shows no one in sight. I’ll put in a short hitch tack in about 1.5 hours to get us around a reef and set us up for a dawn arrival in the Turks and Caicos. Life is very good.
Here is the strange part. I am sitting in the salon with the air conditioning on! We needed to fire the generator to make water from the clean 15,000 ft deep water (see a separate post for our hove to dip). Since the generator was going to be on anyway, we decided to have an air conditioned clean out the fridge dinner utilizing the microwave. We stopped short of watching an episode of ‘Extras’ (a new Ricky Gervaise show) from the iPad, but just barely. All the while sailing along.
Life is strangely good.
Man Overboard Recovery Part 1
While Arthur whiled away the day in his hummus punnet, we decided we ought to practice some man overboard recovery. We started with the last part: getting back on board. After the person has been recovered and is secured to the boat, how do you get them back on board? You can try the sugar-scoops (steps) at the back, but in a heavy sea they will be bouncing up and down and could cause injury. The safest way is over the side on the lee of the boat.
Our day with Arthur, the tiny octopus
On Friday, we discovered our first stowaway or pet or capture — hard to say.
During routine cleaning of our sea strainer, Pete found the usual seaweed detritus plus the tiniest octopus we’d ever seen.
Civilization?
Yesterday we hit Georgetown, the last cruisers refuge before you leave the safety of the bank (protected shallow water). A lot of people get stuck here … forever! There is a hurricane hole on the north side of the harbor that is packed with boats that no longer move. Some are cruisers too scared to go further, some are just retired people living on their boats, and some are drop outs in floating plywood shacks like you would see in Sausalito. They all seem to walk over the hill to the beach everyday and then back to the boat at night with weekly trips to town across the harbor for provisions. It seems like it might be fun for a little while, but a ‘Sartre’-like prison in the long term. Continue reading