Atlantic Crossing. Five Minutes In—Flight Normal :)

Atlantic Crossing. Five Minutes In—Flight Normal 🙂 Days 1–3 The crew is almost in good spirits, and there is almost some wind. For the first day and a half, short, confused waves kicked Lady Mary around from every direction, making it impossible either to engage in polite conversation or to open the portholes. Rain joined forces with the waves, and we tossed from one thunderstorm to the next, continuing to get soaked through—clothes, bodies and souls alike. Whenever there was lightning and thunder, we powered down the boat and crept along, keeping a low profile. In three days, we encountered only two ships and some strange lights that looked like buoys, a hundred miles from the nearest land. On the very first night, a flying fish flopped onto the deck and adorned our breakfast of Thai-style rice. I can’t bring myself to call it food, but the little fish did an honest job as the icing on the cake. Floating infirmary For a while, we headed towards South America at 0.4 knots. On the second day, our senior sailor was laid up with a fever and stomach trouble, while the first mate was felled by a savage headache. The captain was treating with compresses the abrasions that had festered after trudging through the Cape Verdean slurry of shit. On the last rainy day before departure, a murky brown torrent cut off the route to the supermarket, so we delivered provisions for the passage to the boat practically by swimming. At first, the captain treated his abrasions using Doctor Medunitsa’s method. A day later, his leg had swollen up. Then Doctor Pilyulkin arrived in the person of the first mate and, in a stern voice, ordered him to use castor oil rather than honey. And so, in the middle of the night, we set about mixing a miracle wash for gunshot, slash and stab wounds from the contents of pills and ampoules, alcohol and saline, following a recipe from our Senegalese friend Roman. In this floating infirmary, our young sailor had to spend the whole day entertaining herself with audio fairy tales. By the third day, everyone had recovered and, tired of the sails flapping helplessly, we set the two headsails wing-and-wing, poling one of them out with the spinnaker pole. Our speed rose to a whopping 4.5 knots. After the cyclone had passed, the trade winds were too tired to blow at full strength. On the upside, the rolling became steady and almost pleasant. We came across either a cylinder or a large, brightly coloured fender coming the other way. Beyond it began a brown streak of water, unexpected in the open ocean. Too long to be a whale. We all speculated. Perhaps a cruise liner had emptied its tanks—pardon me, its sewage tanks. Or perhaps a ridge had unexpectedly risen from the depths in the middle of the ocean, and we were about to run aground. After putting our eyes and brains to work, we decided it was some kind of murky brown seaweed, fragments of which were also drifting along both sides of the boat, while that streak was simply its main garden. In 65 hours, we covered 215 miles. Another 1,700 nautical miles remain on the rhumb-line course. And you can read about our passage from Spain to the Canary Islands here— It Blew Hard After the Calm. Across the Ocean to the Canaries