Day 10: 18 November 2016

The dark clouds, sometimes associated with rain and gusty winds, seem to be more prevalent during night watch. We can see the rain clouds well on radar, and under the light of the bright moon. On Eric’s night watch of Day 10, an unusually large and dark cloud was tracking directly for Laridae. As the cloud got closer, Eric battened down the hatches to keep rain and salty waves out of the beds. Closer still, Eric reduced sail in an effort to get ahead of the possibly gusty winds. Shortly thereafter, Eric covered up the companion way and put on his rain jacket (Gasp! The first time he has worn that jacket since Falmouth, England!). There he sat – hatches battened, sails reefed, door closed, raincoat on – ready for the worst the squall would offer. And he sat, and sat, and sat. The cloud passed along side and brought no rain or wind.

During the light of day, we were delighted to see schools of fish swimming along side the boat as we sailed at about 5 knots. The fish were about 40-50 cm long and had bright green highlights. Quickly, we deployed the fishing gear, but the only thing that we caught were some nice underwater images of the fish schools with the GoPro.

Have you ever heard a fact that made your head explode? Here is a fact from Day 10: our head exploded! Shortly after Eliana showed Eric that she knew how to flush the head (toilet) all by her self, Eric noticed that it felt a bit clogged. He pumped a few more times to try to push the clog through the system, but the back-pressure grew stronger. In an effort to clear the clog, Eric unscrewed a part of the toilet and — boom! – the contents from all of the toilet plumbing exploded all over the head… and Eric! It took one second to make the mistake of unscrewing that part, and the better part of two hours of Eric and Angela’s work to clean up the $#!tty mess sloshing back and forth in the waves and 30 deg heat. Finally, we fixed clogged toilet and the head is cleaner than it has been in a long time!

Shortly before dark, the light wind became even lighter and we made the decision to gybe and make some tracks to the south. We sailed in light and variable winds, with particularly lumpy seas, all night. Our daily run for Day 10 was only 114 miles.