Welcome to the Berrimilla blog
There's a tight little low forming over the Cape Verdes - at current rate of progress we'll be just behind it. But it seems there are southerlies to the south of it so we may be shaken out of this gentle downwind torpor.
Could someone please tell me where to look for the centre of our galaxy - the nearest constellation would do. Thanks.
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Have you ever flown past a mountain? Or into La Guardia at night low over the Hudson past the tall Manhattan buildings with their lights? Or past the washing lines on those buildings on the way into the old Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong? You get a sense of the proximity of it all yet you are an observer and isolated. Here we are, in tiny Berrimilla, on a black night, Cassiopeia and Sirius just visible in gaps, gliding past an invisible mountain under the ocean and seeing it only in the imagination. We are three miles south of its almost vertical 4000 metre southern face. It's there, invisible, a massive presence, 30 km across just beside and below us. Awesome.
But the ocean moves - broadly there's a clockwise flow around the North Atlantic and here we should be in a southerly current. If only that vast movement of water past the mountain below would cause it to light up like Berri's wake last night! A huge glowing green squareish pyramid filling the depths. Wouldn't that be cool and froody? Might even generate lenticular waves of phosphorescence down current from the peak.
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Today, we are approaching the Tropic Seamount on the edge of the shelf - 4000 metres up to 500 or so in a vertical climb covering only about 5 miles in distance - breathtakingly steep if it were on land and nearly half as high as Everest. It's still 50 odd miles ahead but the sea has gone from deep almost milky blue to grey-green. Possibly unrelated. I've been squeezing it and it tastes just like the blue stuff!
A brief pass by a Storm Petrel - very brief glimpse, like the Madeiran but seemed to have longer thinner wings than in the book and also an all-white rump and tail. There isn't one like it in the book, so I've probably over jizzed. Zark!
Difficult to pick what to talk about - I'm sure that what we have for breakfast can be tedious all round - but perhaps interesting to note that we still have fresh tomatos, potatos, apples, turnips, onions, bacon and eggs. The bacon is packed 4 slices a time into sealed plastic sleeves. Even the very top quality bacon we bought sheds a lot of pus coloured water while awaiting its fate which is good because we don't have to boil it off before the pan will get hot enough to fry. The bacon and eggs and some spuds and apples from Falmouth, the rest from Lisbon. Lisbon tomatos - like no others - wonderful! If there's anything anyone would like us to write about, just holler and we'll see.
Interesting joust gybing the twin pole arrangement - difficult to explain but as a start, we have 24 bits of string coming back to the cockpit many of which are involved in a headsail gybe because we have one big and one small headsail and they must be changed from side to side. Many traps for young players in the process! For a start, if not kept bar taut, the halyard for the red sail gets wound up in the furler for the big one and ain't that a hassle to unwind...etc. We now have the red one on both kite halyards Dave - to try to stabilise the head and stop it unwinding. Time will tell and it could be interesting getting it down.
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