big day, woke up, did my calculations and gave the new course 40 to 45° and for the first time there is more east than north in out route - now this might seem a very insignificant event, but for a bunch of nuts in a bathtube trying to get to the other side of the Atlantic we’re supposed to be going east... in other words our VMG has been poor up till now, like all our efforts have been to position ourselves with respect to the weather so we can head east and watch those VMGs go up. The kite came down, we trimmed the sails and did some hocuspocus to get Mona the windvane working the helm. I then went off with my black tool bad and and tore all the panels off the fore cabin roof and then crawled into the fore peak to tighten bolts - looking for leaks - keep the water out!! The sludge we’re creating is definitely diesel leaking out of a fuel water separator that looks too old and delicate to mess with out here, the diesel is shaking it up with the salt water to make quite the kunk all over our canned food in the bilge. Winds have been variable up till today but we’ve done 68M in the last 12 hours. I did a curry tonight with all the left overs - exception to the captain doesn’t have galley duties rule. I had all sorts of projects for this crossing : do celetual nav, do yoga every day, write a book... but there has been to much to do without the added nav, yoga is quite impossible on a topsy turvy floor, and I have nothing in my head these days to write about, no profound thoughts. Life is very basic here, discussions rare, the agenda all booked up with eat, sleep, wash and sail... I add to this the nav, the weather, the maintenance and keep an eye on everyone. Text by Esa : Jeeman, roti is the thing, taste that! Said the taxi man when I arrived to Trinidad. We had several roties in Power boat yard. The roti place was just next to us. Early morning rotiman and the rotiwoman came to their restaurant and started to prepare delicious rotis. It’s like Indian curry combined with pizza. You can have veggie, chicken, duck, goat, beef roties. You name it they have it. Instead of wheat flour roties are done from mashed chick peas combined with baking powder. Curry is folded into the pizza like in calzone and the dinner is ready. We didn’t take roties to the boat. In two weeks we got more than enough of them and felt the curry sweating through the skin in 35 celsius. When we finally left Chagaramas and Trinidad and Power Boat docks Naomi was loaded with everything we could imagine we would need in the galley during 30 days for 4 persons. According to NOLS bulk food system it would mean 120 kg which would give us 3000 kcal/day so it would be 1 kg/pers/day (thank you Michael for introducing NOLS, National outdoor leadership schools principles!). Fridge was full of yogurts, parmesan, gouda, juice, delicate vegetables, salami, gouda, bacon, sausage. The saloon cuboards had their weekly portions including rice, beans, lentils, pasta, pesto, olive oil, milk, jams, peanut butter, cereals, brownies, bread, graham flours, all different condiments from basilico to Angostura. Not talking of all the cans which just waited to be blocked from the bilge. We were prepared for serious ocean cruising plus emergency baggage with ready made soups in cans and dried food from beef jerky to mousse de chocolat not forgetting the eggpowder! What is Angostura? The Trinits are proud of their angostura production. You are able to find angostura from rom to soya sauce. It’s a aromatic bitter (orig. from the city of Angostura Venezuela) normally used for some drinks which are not in fashion any more. We have to get angostura simply because Finland was once the biggest exporter of angostura. That happened after the prohibition law some years ago. The bureaucrats who were in charge of finding something to drink for thirsty Finns had hard time to decide where to buy all sprits and vine. So they found an old list before prohibition. List had load of spirits from all over the old and new world France, Italy, Hungary, US. They couldn’t understand why there were just few hundred bottles of Angostura. They thought that there must be a mistake and order at once enough of it…tens of thousands of bottles. Same quantities like the other bottles. No one knew where Trinidad was but soon the Trinits knew were Finland was when cargo ships were heading north. Later in wartime Finland became the biggest Angostura exporter in Europe because no one could get their favourite drink behind the ocean because of the German subs. Dry bread what we love on boats was specially hard to find. We went with Juha trough all Hi Lows (local supermarket) but no dried bread. We went so despaired that we bought 3 kilos of tortillas, which seemed to be the only bread like product that would last more than a week. Our skipper didn’t believe that we would be able to bake our own bread onboard even we had carefully planned everything with yeast and all kind of flour and even the boat has an original Eno -owen. (We will surprise him soon!) The day we were going to leave we saw a big pile of famous Swedish Wasa knäckebröd in our local super. The trip was saved and we felt that B. Marley’s Allmighty had his hand on this super natural happening. We were ready to start cooking along. esa Back to me. These guys did a great job on the food, really. i’m not quite sure how we’re going to eat all this stuff. To add to the piles of food they bought, we were inundated by food from other sailors when they heard we had engine troubles; They were all leaving their boats down there and we were the only boat leaving in the other direction. 4 guys alone on a boat, with engine troubles and crossing the great water. We now have a very interesting collection of bottles of sauces and 5 boxes of baking powder, ketchup (we have 6 bottles!!!) and half used bags of pasta... And yes the captain couldn’t imagine bread baking in the 35° cabin a week ago, but it is getting cooler. My salt water over the head this morning was even a bit shocking... xxxx p
