I forgot to note in the rice bowl recipe that you should be sure to add bouillon or some kind of seasoning to the mix. And I also forgot to mention that we aren't drinking real coffee on passages since it's too hard to balance everything when we're in motion. We normally use a Melitta #4 plastic filter which fits on top of a regular coffee cup. But we use Nissan insulated cups which have a much narrower top. So the cup has to stay on the counter while I hold the filter over it with one hand and pour hot water out of the tea kettle into the filter with the other hand. Tricky enough to do in a bouncy anchorage, let alone underway at sea. John got the bright idea to buy instant coffee (in our case it's Colcafe from Columbia) for passages since he swears he doesn't mind the taste. After two mornings of that dreck I've decided to switch to tea during passages; I don't want to waste my hard-to-find instant hot chocolate mix on lousy coffee (which I normally drink with two tablespoons of hot chocolate mix for a sort of mocha coffee - yummy).
It's finally calm enough, and John has the more reliable (than the wheel lock) wind vane steering, so I can get some reading done. Which makes a nice change from staring out at grey sky and sea! In the last 24 hour period our DMG was 92.5, we sailed all of it, and we have about 330 nm left to go (out of a total distance of about 517 nm). A smaller pod of dolphins than yesterday's just went whizzing by to who knows where, and the sun is really shining for a change. Maybe we'll have a nice sunset tonight.
John writes: Linda mentioned that I set the wind vane to steer the boat this morning. She was asleep, so she doesn't know how much of a pain it was. We dismantled this machine (a Rube Goldberb thing that uses feedback from a little sail to twist a rod, that lifts a bar, that turns a shaft, that rotates a paddle, that turns a shaft, that pulls on a rope, that turns the steering wheel, that turns the boat) back in Bahia to make sure it was clean, lubricated and properly adjusted. Five minutes after I set it working this morning I heard a clunk and it stopped steering the boat. I emptied the after compartment that holds all the important stuff (no small feat, considering the amount of junk stored there) to find three bolts had completely come out of the thing and the part that pulls on the rope was just dangling. I had to climb in there and search to retrieve the missing nuts and bolts. I could only find two of the three bolts but I found all the missing nuts, then reassembled it all while the boat is merrily sailing along. I had to sit on top of the rudder to do all this, thank goodness the boat was steering itself and the rudder was locked in one position. Anyway, I bolted the thing back together using lock-tite so hopefully it won't come apart again.
Linda and John
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