Booooring, that may describe this blog or the subject matter. I feel like the nightime DJ on WKRP. I actually had a blog request - what is life like on the boat (i.e. storms, sharks, pirates, where do we stop at night, etc.). Sailiing is often depicted as 98% pure joy and 2% sheer terror. Luckily, we have avoided the sheer terror.

For the uninitiated, we sail 24/7. When we left the Canary Islands 8 days ago, we had to be totally self sufficient to sail for over three weeks covering about 2500nm. - no 7-11s out here. The crew is assigned a watch schedule; there is always someone at the helm. We are on watch for 2 hours and then off for 6 hours. We keep the same watches every day. Each one of us has certain additional ship chores such as cooking, baking, KP, makiing water, checking rigging and engine fluids, etc. We also have our personal chores such as maintaining journals or doing laundry. After a few days out, the boat seems to develop a rhythm of its own. Someone is almost always catching a nap; however, as you can see in the photo, most of our time is spent lounging about with our noses in our Kindles. I have lost track, but I think I just finished my 7th book and Jens is ahead of me. Ken claims to have read 2 books in the last 3 days, but I really don't think comic books count! The one time that the crew is guaranteed to be together is at 1700 (5:00pm) for our "sundowner" (beer). We generally dine about 1800 and share a bottle of wine. Ken likes to say that he runs a sober boat, not a dry boat. "Katy, bar the door", it will probably be ugly when we have our first night in port. The big negative about a long passage is the lack of exercise.

PIRATES - none reported in this area. We do not carry arms. Right now AIS doesn't show a ship within 256 miles of us.

WAVES - nothing scary. We have had some rollers up to 12 ft. but with long periods in between. The boat glides gently over them. We have had a couple of days of "disturbed" seas with smaller waves coming from several directions. These are not scary either, but make life aboard uncomfortable. Everything needs to be secured and you have to hold on whenever you move about. In fact, we strap ourselves into bed at night using lee cloths. If it gets really bad we have to eat out of bowls because our food literally slips off of plates.

WEATHER - we use "Commander", a weather routing service. They actually suggest the route that we should sail to take advantage of the best wind and to avoid any dangerous weather... giving us satellite updates for our exact location as we go. The weather along the Costa del Sol after leaving Malaga was chilly with the crew dressed in layers. We had one night of heavy rain near Gibraltar and miserable weather the day we landed in the Canaries. After leaving Las Palmas we headed southerly and are now in the "Little Latitudes" enjoying blue skies, warm weather, and an easterly wind which is excellent for sailing. Commander had forcast some squalls for yesterday morning, and didn't disappoint. However, we were able to turn on our radar, "see" the storms, and alter course to avoid the worst of them.

SAFETY - Moonbeam is a well founded full keel, heavy displacement boat that is designed for offshore sailing. When on deck outside the cockpit we each wear our life vest. Our life vests have tethers and at night or in rough weather we are always tethered to the boat. We do carry a survival raft and EPIRB (position locating beacon) neither of which we ever want to deploy. It is always a wake up call when we pack our "ditch bag" with survival gear, passports, medicines, extra food, etc. and practice deploying the raft.

In summary, if you are a prudent mariner, it isn't that dangerous out here. We haven't seen any nasty mean sea monsters yet! We'll be on the lookout, only 1758nm to go.

Oh yeah, the score is now fish 11 and Moonbeam 2. This was through no fault of our own. An obviously retarded flying fish jumped onto our deck during the night and basicallly committed suicide to help us improve the score card. We found the poor guy early this morning.