5th September

17 49.798 S

169 07.500 W



Weather; sunny, wind 4-10 knots, waves 1metre



I'm still kicking myself for a cooking blunder I made yesterday, we were just out of muesli bars after eating the last 2 for breakfast so I decided to make up another batch whilst the seas weren't throwing us all over the place. I had used up all of the baking paper that we had on board with the previous bake so I thought it would be alright to line the baking pan with tin foil, word to the wise here Ð it was not alright! Anyway once I had made the mix and baked it, I took the pan out and let it cool before trying to remove the muesli bar mixture and cut it into slices. Try is the operative word here! The mixture is a very sticky one to start with and I gave no thought whatso ever to the fact that as it cools the mixture hardens and sets like concrete, so I went back to it after it had cooled and tried to take it off of the foil lining, it was stuck fast in most places and just wouldn't release. I was frustrated and angry with myself for not thinking it through properly but
I was also determined that I wasn't going to waste the entire mixture so I spent the best part of an hour peeling, digging, gouging or whatever other method I could think of to get the majority of the baked mixture off of the foil. I ended up with one hell of a holy mess which I then pushed and poked back into shape and hoped that it would hold some sort of shape if I put it into the fridge for 24 hours. The test came this morning when we tried the "bars" for want of a better word, they were ok, a little crumbly and you need to be aware that there might be the odd bit of foil lingering somewhere amongst them but at least they taste OK, thank goodness we have had our old amalgam tooth fillings replaced with porcelain stuff! So take warning from my mistake and don't think that a sticky mixture will be OK to bake on tin foil.

Just as the sun set last night , without us being able to see it behind the clouds lining the horizon, the wind dropped away to nothing once again and we had to put the engine back on, and ran it until around midnight when we suddenly got a change of direction and enough wind to blow us along for a while. Of course it didn't last and we have had the engine on and off a couple of times during the daylight hours until now Ð it is currently running as the wind has yet again died away to less than 6 knots. The seas have dropped correspondingly which makes it a bit more pleasant to move around the boat, not that we have any reason to do so today, the slower speed means that we haven't bothered putting the hook and line in the water today Ð we just aren't going fast enough for anything to be fooled into taking the bait. We heard from our Tahiti neighbour who is at least 200 miles south of us and he has had a tough time for the past 36 hours with a wind blast going through the area
of 40 plus knots Ð we know that he's OK but he has had to tie down his solar panels and replace the ties that hold his Bimini in place as the wind ripped them out. I know I keep on about this being a slow and frustrating trip but I'm very glad that we aren't where he is at the moment and to think that he is by himself doing this shows that he has rocks in his head!.

Straight after breakfast this morning Gerry had us fiddling about with the spinnaker pole once more, he wanted to take the jib sheet off of the pole so that we could fly the jib alongside the main rather than goose winging it. This meant having to lower the spinnaker pole to the deck to remove the sheet so I was once again winching the topping lift for the darned pole whilst Gerry was out on deck fiddling with removing the sheet Ð it really is too much hard work first thing in the morning, the worst thing is that I know we are going to have to reverse the whole procedure at some point when he wants to goose wing the sails again Ð something to look forward to, or not! It's been a very quiet day so we have played around with the music and challenged each other with guess that tune.

As we come up to the 24 hour mark we have covered a further 119 NM of which 14 hours has been mechanical wind assisted. There has still been no sign of life apart from ourselves in any direction. We are somewhat surprised to not even have seen flying fish, it would seem that the ocean is pretty much emptied out!