I've felt almost all the time since arriving in Falmouth back in May that we've been coming from behind - first with the Russian applicaion,then the gearbox, the damper plate (my fault entirely, that one), the spammed website (me again) the AirX, the damper plate again and all the other trivia that have made things difficult. But the gate seems to have opened a crack. And I've just managed something essentially trivial but with serious potential to go wrong - I have set up the satphone to work with sailmail and tested it - sent the last message then pulled in a GRIB - and it WORKS. To those of you geeks who can't see why this is the high country of elation - lucky you! Nothing with this stuff ever seems to work without a struggle for me so I'm a happy little veggie. High praise too for Jim's instructions on the sailmail website.
More on routine: we've been sailing dead downwind since leaving Lisbon, mostly in less that 15 knots and often about 10. This means that the Airbreeze doesn't have enough apparent wind to keep the batteries charged - we're doing 5 over the ground so the apparents are 10 max. So we must run the engine for an hour every morning and evening and have to monitor fuel use. I'm just about to check its vitals before cranking it up again. While it's running, we also run the water maker which, in this warm water, easily makes 4.5 litres/hr.
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