Atlantic Crossing. Days 11–12

Atlantic Crossing. Days 11–12 The season of momentous dates has begun 🙂 Yesterday, 1 October, Ladunya turned five and a half. Our little junior crew member really isn’t so little anymore :)... To mark the occasion, we opened a tin of lychees in sugar syrup. In celebration, Nastya rustled up another pizza, while Lada sewed a pair of trousers for her doll all by herself—and very well, I might add. She really is a big girl now ;). And today there are as many as two events: First, we have broken our record for time spent on the open sea. The winter before last, it took us 12 days to sail from Malta to Almerimar in Spain, through storms and rain. On day 10, the crew’s morale plummeted, coinciding with the depletion of our fruit supplies. We stretched two carrots and the last apple between the four of us for two days. It was rough and chilly; over the 1,100-mile passage, the storms tore the boom away from the mainmast and ripped the bolt rope out of the mainsail. This time we’re doing the ocean in easy mode: the sail has already been patched, the boom is in place, we have almost a whole crate of apples, the bananas have survived in good health to this very day, and there are a couple of kiwis, lemons, pumpkins and even a tomato ). If only we had a little more wind... Second, today we finally caught a fish worth mentioning. A bonito about 70 centimetres long. A shoal of small tuna gathered behind the yacht for the cleaning scraps, and a couple of them ended up on a simple handline with a hook; one did get away almost from the deck while Nastya and I lazily reached for the landing net: “What would we do with any more of them?” Otherwise we could have caught about five—they’re completely fearless here and shoot out from under the yacht for the guts faster than the wind. But we had to stop fishing because we couldn’t possibly eat that much. Oh!—our fishing enthusiasm was also dampened somewhat by a certain substance inside the second fish that looked very much like worms... The anglers’ faces fell, and we remembered the sashimi we had just eaten... So all the remaining meat was consigned to the purifying fire—in the pressure cooker. We’re making excellent headway A magical sunset in the evening, rain at night, and a dead calm by day. We set the sails wing and wing, added the mizzen, and ooooff we go!—at a whole 1 mile per hour. The instruments say that at this rate we’ll definitely be in South America by New Year. Not bad, if you ask me. Just in time for the heat to subside and the rains to stop ). Meanwhile, the captain ordered us to conserve water more carefully: a quarter of our supply is already gone. It’s very hot. We’d happily spend the whole day hanging from a rope astern if Marina—and Nastya with her—weren’t afraid of sharks. Only the captain and the younger junior crew member are afraid of nothing. Lada explains matter-of-factly that the sharks here are small and won’t attack prey larger than themselves. But not everyone wants to put that to the test :). We’ve just spotted a rounded object about 300 metres abeam, looking either like a pink buoy or an inflated lifejacket. We decided to go over to it. Please don’t let it be a body, we prayed quietly. The buoy turned out to be a buoy. Slightly overgrown with barnacles, with three crabs aboard and some kind of aluminium tag bearing illegible alien symbols. We’re still going nowhere. +34°C in the shade and a dead calm. In 12 days we’ve covered 1,145 nautical miles, with almost 800 still to go to our destination.