Letters from the Hugbucket

Part 7, Sailing Las Palmas, Spain – Santa Maria, Cape Verde.

Nov. 18^th 2010

Another beautiful sunrise! The gift of the morning shift.

View from the captains seat

I would never think that I could get into any kind of routine of this rough weather, wave and living condition but just the fact that I woke up 3 minutes before Gunnar blew air in the whistle sending out the sound that had rushed me out of my limited bedtime so many times, I guess was a signal that the body is a remarkable instrument that can adjust and capable of much more than we ever imagine.

So I felt all right with going up 06.00 in the morning after a few hours sleep. I even looked forward to the sunrise – you have to find and capture the positive elements right!

I had a great feeling of festivity on this shift.. I realized that I just had a dream of me having a birthday party. A big one. I received guests, two at a time, in a hall and danced with them into the party area. Unique welcome and lot of celebration. Funny how my dreams focuses on parties in these rolling conditions. Either sub consciousness was trying to protect me from waking up because waves psychically moved me back and forth in the cabin – like dancing in the dreamland – or my brain just wanted to cheer me up:)

When I blew the whistle at 09.00 to get Gunnar up I suggested that we pulled a bit more out of the front sail. It turned out that it was not a wise decision. It immediately cracked further up making us more vulnerable as we lost more speed and since main sail was already broken we were counting on the last square meters of sail. It made Gunnar erupt with the hardest comment to me on the journey: “That was a bad idea!”…

Look at that piece of torn front sail. Only top part give us some tiny speed. Really bad situation.

As compensation I tried to hoist the healthy part of the main sail but it was in vain. The torn part no matter how much I tried to tie it got stuck on the way up. What could help to speed us up? Any idea was sincerely welcome! Gunnar proposed to set up some kind of linen in the rear end of the boat. I got the blue cover for the main sail. And so it happened that the cover for the main sail became our actual main sail.

Happy with the new "boosting" main sail situation. Notice the orange whistle bottom right... THE dream robber!

The GPS now confirmed our movement which was heavy assisted by current to 3 knots which was not terrible taking our condition into consideration. It looked extremely weird and we would not win any speed contest but it after all pushed us a little bit.

With this our new “main sail” up it completely took the rear view but what the heck. Waves were not that massive anymore and if any ship would approach we would just have to rely on that they have seen this small piece of torn sailboat.

I got the cornflakes again with lukewarm milk and slept from 11.00 - 13.00 and enjoyed the afternoon shift from 14.00 – 17.00. Then I decided to make us some proper hot food. The decision fell on rice with onion, garlic and sausages. Spiced up and including soya and ketchup this turned into a true culinary gourmet dinner. After all it was our first “real” prepared food for 7 days!!! And now I was at it I made sure to make more than enough so that we by any means would have leftovers to fry the coming days. OK I admit it. The food was really nothing special but in this situation it was first class – amazing how basic needs can become such a pleasure!

Smiles were back on our faces now Neptune was behaving better

Now Neptune and the waves were behaving, the captain and I concluded that we could step up the shifts to a duration of 4 hours so after a few hours of sleep the whistle forced me back up in the red lit cockpit at 22.00 hours. Chocolate and fruit gum filled my pockets to support my sleepy condition. But I found myself was back in survival mode and my concentration was in a suspiciously low level. I realized that the planned heading of 210 actually in real life was swinging from 180 – 240 degrees. Again and again I tried to keep concentration just to find myself on the edge of the degrees once more. It was not especially accurate but at least nothing wrong with the direction. We were not moving away from our target...