Life on the Ocean, After 3+ Weeks

Friday, Dec. 3, was a nice day of gentle winds, sunny skies and a couple oddities. We agreed that after Dec. 1 we could listen to one Christmas album each morning. So around 11 a.m. we put on Leon Redbone’s "Christmas Island" and got in the holiday mood.

I decided to bake some bread while the ride was smooth so I dumped some Italian seasoning into the flour and got my yeast mix going. I was kneading away on the galley counter and stopped to realize that I was baking bread, while listening to Frosty the Snowman, while wearing shorts and a tank top, while Pat was up steering with no shirt on, in the middle of the ocean, while it was 80 degrees and sunny, 1,500 miles from land. For two guys from Minnesota, this is a pretty odd run-up to Christmas! Maybe just listening to holiday music while wearing life jackets and harnesses is strange...

So last night for dinner we had Italian bread rolls, Dal Makhani with tofu and the Rat Pack Christmas CD for prep music. We just passed a time zone, so after dinner we have a couple hours together in the cockpit to listen to a couple shows from the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour as it gets dark. Last night the two shows we listened to were Hair and Food. The night before we listened to Water and Time - two subjects we have too much of at the moment. Bob talks for a few minutes in-between each song with some fun history about the song and/or the performer.

We get amazingly engaged when we see anything at all out here that isn't a wave. Last night we saw our third ship - it came within six miles of us before bearing away. Today Pat spotted a white thing bobbing in the water so we sailed a little closer and determined it was a buoy that had come loose from some fish or crab pot somewhere. I guess it doesn't take much to get us going.

Pat and I are worried that when we get home, once asleep we will jump out of bed after three hours and go sit on the front porch with a flashlight and binoculars for three hours, and then go back to bed. 35 days of never sleeping more than 3 hours at a time will be a hard habit to break. When this is over we can't decide if we will get an apartment together or never see each other again. We have resorted to topics like "Tell me about your first bicycle" to keep the conversation going!

A flying fish found its way into the dodger and behind some gear where made it stink like, well, a dead fish. BTW, a flying fish flopping under the dodger in the dark in the middle of the night is enough to scare big strong men.

And while we’re on smells, yesterday we found the source of an odd smell - a container of leaking gear oil and got all that cleaned up. This is too small of a micro-environment to have something stink. (That isn't one of us...)

We’ve certainly found it is possible to be deeply annoyed by the wind at both ends of the spectrum - too much and not enough, and then back again, in less than 24 hours. We can report that reading ceases to be fun at over 20 knots of wind speed.
Other random things to report:
You can actually do laundry while heeled over at 15 degrees in 20 knots of wind.

Our food got tossed off the upper shelf earlier today for the second time. First time, shame on the wind; second time, shame on us!

Pat has not had coffee for over 20 days. (And for those who know Pat, yes, that's true!) We each had our first piece of chocolate in 20 days two nights ago.


For those of you into garbage - we will hit Florida in a couple weeks with two small plastic grocery bags of garbage. We worked pretty hard at food packaging to make sure we didn't have a lot of trash to haul back. 90% of our garbage will be plastic packaging.

These are all among the many things we’re doing, and thinking about, as we focus on getting to Florida!!


Posted by Peggy, on behalf of Pat and Tom, aboard Remedios, Atlantic Ocean