Position 06°56’367N 055°15’772W
415Nm to Trinidad.
Bearing 174T 65.8Nm Paramaribo, Suriname.
Hi dear friends, thank you for following our journey. Here’s is this week’s update;.
I have an urgent request. If anyone has any cake (easy) recipes for use onboard please send them in as the 3 kilo of ‘Stalk’ margarine and the 1.5K of butter I acquired a while ago needs to be used up by the end of April. I have left all my cook books back in the UK
Ok, now the serious bit is out of the way a little quiz for you;
Trinidad holds two world records in the ‘fast food’ market, what are they? answer at the bottom of the update.
Well it has been a contrast with some of the best sailing so far and some of the worst. The best, well that has to be sailing in the force 9 we had the other day. I only had a ‘hanky’ (hanky chief size) of the Genoa, okay it’s a little bigger than that, about 1.5 metres out.
We were doing 8kts and I had set the pace so we would be just ahead of any breaking waves. All around us was a sea of turquoise and foaming white bubbles of sea, spray filled the air.. It is very hard to picture this unless you have seen it yourself so I will try to do so for you (now this should be good).
If you can imagine a fried egg (eh egg, bacon, black pudding, fried bread, sausages and Heinz baked beans em, baked beans… whoops got a little excited there for a moment) where the yoke would be turquoise in colour while the white would, okay be white but a mass of foaming white sea with spray all around. Now the size of this would egg would be 5 to 10 metres.
I turned on ‘Arnie’ (the auto pilot) so I could turn around and watch these waves approach the stern of the boat. As they approach they start rising ending up just about shoulder height, then as they reach head height the edges start to collapse in…. now this is where the ‘egg’ thingy comes in.
The top of the wave for about 4 metres long and 50cm deep is clear, strong turquoise in colour while surrounding this is just a mass of foaming sea… As the wave decreases in height so the foam turns to spray, then suddenly it all collapses inwards leaving ‘egg’ everywhere.. wow did that ‘eggy’ thing work for you. em not sure here but I will leave it in.
Now Pinta was surrounded by these on all sides for as far as the eye could see. Egg’y sea everywhere, okay that’s enough of the egg’y thing it’s putting me off my healthy, fresh fruit cocktail I made this morning.. funny thing is though I still have several bottles of HP sauce (eh egg, bacon, black pudding, fried bread, sausages and Heinz baked beans. whoops I said that already).
It is also nice to see dolphins return and keep us company for the evenings.
Life on board:
After being onboard for over eight months Peter will be signing off (leaving) Pinta a few weeks after our arrival their. Peter in between ‘doing his own thing’ he will take this opportunity to increase his sailing knowledge. Trinidad & Tobago because of their location, i.e. outside the hurricane area has one of the largest sailing communities in the world (given its size) and so Peter should have no problem obtaining more crewing experience.
As for me, well I have the toughest task, I will continue to sail around the Caribbean islands finding the occasional , little bay somewhere, sling up the hammock and rest after the arduous sailing we have done this past two weeks.
This has to be the best trip for food yet, In Brazil the government keep food prices low so I purchased three ‘T’ bone stakes for 80 pence, three sirloin stakes for £1.00 and six half chickens for 90 pence. That and the wonderful fresh fruit, pineapples, apples, pears, bananas and grapes was a nice treat.
A rather interesting chocolate cake which turned out to be more like a chocolate brownie / mud pie sort of thing really. However I have say this was down to a problem with the oven which developed some 15 minutes into the cooking time. We had to overcome this by wedging in the oven gas button with a fishing lure to hold it in (more on that below)
The boat:
PINTA is working well with the only new or replacement part needed is the steering wheel cover, we have hand steered Pinta for well over 12,000Nm so far and like most things in this world, if not indeed the world itself, It is currently being held together with ‘Duct tape’ (thanks ‘L’)
The cooker or more precise the oven stopped working this week, this was down to suspected faulty ‘thermistor’ (not sure if that’s the right name or spelling, you know how bad my memory is). So any ‘Gorgi’ registered fitters receiving this please stop cringing, I am sure I could not afford your call out charge bearing in mind my current location.
Fair winds and calm seas.
David.
Answer to the quiz:
1. It has the busiest KFC in the world
2. It has the largest Pizza Hut in the world which used to be cinema