Seems our little bijou res. in a plastic tube has a stalker. The bird that has been visiting us has been back foe three nights at least - too dark once again to get colours but has the wings and silhouette of a small Petrel but not the head and beak. It turns up in the dark and is gone by daylight. We have sailed nearly 400 miles since it first arrived so it must be keeping us more or less in sight during the day. I have occasionally thought that I spotted it way out in the peripheries - little brown moving speck merged into the murky dapple.
Things you learn - a week or so on the port tack is very hard work. Bijou res. this little boat may be but it's awful short of comfy places to sit and if the cockpit is continually getting doused by crashing spray the only place, and not for long, is the cabin sole which gets pretty hard, unforgiving and cornery.
'Nuff whingeing - we're moving south. Rainsqualls, drenching spray and 25 knot gusts in an 'orrible short steep jerky sea. Not a lot of opportunity for washing and powdering the self so the pit and crutch feral collection is thriving. The boot variety is just festering in the heat up in the forepeak so there will be an interesting reunion out there in the future.
Time to make a cuppa and then do the 0700 position.
I've lost my iridium connection from the laptop. It's a com port problem - the computer crashes every now and again and loses its dial up connection settings for the 19200 modem but the set-up wizard then loses/doesn't see the original com port and for some reason although the wizard says it's connected through another port, Telnet cannot see it. Drives me absolutely raging insane but I cant fix it. Any ideas? Work around may be to use backup laptop for sailmail. Absolute PITA.
