Time to leave
06 January 2018
We all get up early on the first day of sailing and for reasons that I'm not too sure about, we are turning back to Cape Verde. On our return one of our crew members is not coming with us any more. When we went in to pickup fuel ⛽️. I was down at the aft (back end) of the boat ⛵️ standing by to use a line to secure us to the pontoon, when I feel and hear 👂 a banging and scraping sound from up ahead. The skipper 👩✈️ has only gone and hit the corner of the refuelling pontoon with the boat⛵️, I then hear all sorts of 😫 cursing and shouting. When we were secure I had a look at the damage to the boat, it was not bad but by no means good, it had taken the paint 🎨 off down to the metal ( if it had been a plastic boat we would have had a huge hole I think 🤔). Time to put the sails up as we motored out of the marina yet again it felt ok, but I just have an uneasy feeling that this isn't the last of our problems for this part of my trip.
The watch patterns have been sorted and we are on 2 hour stints between the 4 of us, not too bad me thinks, time will tell. My first one was 22:00 till 00:00. When I went to bed, I was rudely awoken with my cabin door banging around because of the rolling boat⛵️, so I got up and found Robert on watch. At about 08:30 he said that the deck needed washing down, after the wash down I noticed a clip that had come undone. As I stepped down to sort it, my right foot slipped on the wet deck and went under the scuppers, (slots in the side of the boat ⛵️about 2" high) taking the skin off of the top of my foot. It's rather painful 😖 and swollen but I don't think anything is broken, I have cleaned it up with a Bettadine solution and put a plaster over it, I have decided that I will not touch it for a few days and see how it goes. Our speed is a little ponderous to say the least but I for one am the only one who doesn't mind, everyone else seems to be in a great rush to get across. Our two new crew members, David (21) and Marion 23, are like a breath of fresh air, they are enthusiastic when they aren't asleep 😴. David is trying to charm the fish 🐠 out of the sea 💦 with his singing 🎤. They have both taken their turn at cooking 🍳 and again they have both excelled at it, with two nice evening meals.