Day 7: Useful things

By the end of the first week offshore, you start to have strong opinions about the things you chose to bring along with you. Because there isn’t much else around to have opinions about.

Awesome things: 1. Our Quantum asymmetrical spinnaker. This thing is awesome. It handles light winds so much better than our Parasailor did. Right now we are making 5.5 kts through the water in 7 kts of apparent wind, even going pretty far downwind. 2. Debbie Meyer Green Bags. No, seriously. Mel had packed a few things in her few remaining bags before the Disaster and was still eating tomatoes out of one of them three weeks later. Right now, they are keeping a whole bunch of bananas green, and our green peppers, carrots, and tomatoes are still crunchy. This is a much better system than breaking up the bunch and wrapping each banana tip in saran wrap, which never worked. So much for internet-inspired “life hacks.” 3. Old garden hoses, fire hoses, and teflon spray for anti-chafe. You can never have too much anti-chafe. 4. Good headphones with gold connectors. Last time we had cheap, $19 headphones and by the end of a 10-day offshore 2 out of 3 headsets weren’t working anymore. It’s all in the connector.

Crappy things: 1. Our hydrogenerator. Rest in Peace.

Boat stuff: 147 nm in 23.5 hours. We’ve sailed 1161 nm in the first week. Spinnaker is still up. Wind is dropping off to 7 kts apparent, and so we are trying to keep the wind angle higher, at least 135-145 to keep our speed up. We are fortunately getting away from the tanker traffic around the Cape Verdes, sparing us from the late-night “Baaalllliiii”, who must be a brother of Mario.