[Dar Es Salaam - Phuket] Day 16 -- Deep Blue

Still, there was no wind, on day sixteen as well. The sea had now calmed even more. Most of the tiny little waves and cobbles on the surface had now gone as well. The wind had come to a halt and the little breeze registered by our instruments came just from our own forward movement. While from afar the oily sea surface appeared to be made of liquid mercury, from close up and from the top it was almost even and transparent blue. The sunrays bore deep into the water and seemed to spread out into every direction into the endless blue. Whatever was in the water could clearly be seen, but besides a small fish or dead algae there was really not much. A teapot seemed to contain more particles than this ocean.

During the night another rapala had been lost to a madly big fish that had just bitten through the line way above the steel forward. With no more swivels left in the box I tried to improvise one all morning, but found nothing suitable to work with. I decided to let it go and put the next rapala in without a swivel, hoping the line wouldn't twist too much. There were not many rapalas left and we were not even halfway through the journey.

The day before, during a short call with the boat owner on the satellite phone, we had unravelled the mystery of an orange light that lit regularly on the dashboard. We had water in the bathroom, under the floor. My brother had started to try to solve the mystery fully. Actually, a pump was supposed to drive the water out. Even though we could clearly hear it work, the water stayed in place. After Andrew had lifted the floor of and found the drain we could still not locate the failure. We decided to blow the pipe through. I mounted a hose and tightened it with a cloth, but my lungs were just to weak to cause any effect of the apparently blocked pipe. So we mounted the hose to a footpump and my brother managed to blow the blockage through. Turning the pump switch again the water slowly started disappearing, the pump itself groaning and squeaking heavily as just about to give up and fail. It didn't and all the water was soon gone.

I spent most of the afternoon reading. By now, a close examination of the boat had yielded two English books. My French was non-existent, a sad fact with about two dozen interesting books in French available on board. I had decided a novel would bring more fun than a Thai language book for now. While the first novel, a Tom-Clancy-like agents adventure, had read through easily, the second book, a pirate hunter's story on the Indian Ocean in the time when Singapore was still a little native village, was much thinner, but proved to be quite hard to read. On the other hand, it dealt with exactly the part of the ocean we were yet to cross and there was just not much to choose from as well.

captains log:
0730 unroll Genoa
loose our 5th rapalla, very bad, have no more swivels
biggish swell from the SE, wind NEE 3-5kn
1200 1°20 E63°47
1300 revs E=249,25h
try to find blockage in shower pump
repair works, pipe was blocked
wind on the nose, 4-5kn
birds are shitting all over us
roll up Genoa