What a difference a day makes

Glancing back to yesterday's blog, Day 4 is turning out to be different in several ways.

 

We both managed decent sleep on our off-watches of four hours and during the night the wind started to ease enough to return to full sail (this involves shaking out reefs that reduced the sail area of the main and yankee to make Maunie more manageable). Actually, with Winnie, the windpilot doing a fantastic job in steering, it's good to have jobs to do that add a bit of variety and activity to a night watch. Last night gave us a star filled sky with quite a few shooting stars to entertain us.

 

This morning saw the wind continue to ease so we added the staysail to our sail plan to maintain some speed. The lofty speeds of 7 kts have plummeted to below 5 but we're happily heading in the right direction with a slightly later ETA at Chesterfield Reef of midday on Monday. The wind isn't quite strong enough to support the Irish Flag spinnaker for now but maybe later...

 

The good news is that we have clear blue sky giving lots of solar charging. With that, Constance the autopilot can leap into action and take over the steering from Winnie for a while. The seas have calmed down too so life is much less rolly on Maunie. This makes life so much easier – from adjusting sails in the cockpit, preparing food, washing up or even going to the loo! By the way, we like to create our own entertainment on Maunie: when washing up, we never allow any water to go down the sink to avoid blockages. Instead, we take on the 'walk of death' which involves balancing from the galley, through the pilot house, up the companionway steps and out into the cockpit where we hang on to a rail with one hand and empty the washing up bowl (having first checked for a stray spoon) with the other. Forgive us if we've told this story on previous blogs but it's small tasks like this that are a real challenge in the conditions of the past few days. Today life is good and we appreciate how much easier things are.