On day eight the wind died and the sea went calm. Sailing didn't get us anywhere now, so we turned on the engine. We had checked oil again and everything was fine. We were still puzzled why we had filled up two days ago out of nowhere. With no idea of how long the calm would last, we did our first attempt to retrieve our weather forecast at sea that I had installed in our last night at Dar Es Salaam yacht club. With a shaky satellite connection and many many tries we got our little weather email and looked at the wind charts unhappy. Three days of calm lay ahead. With no time to loose, that meant three days of engine. Even though the ship being noisy and the fun being somewhat less, somehow it did have its advantages. The boat suddenly went up straight, not cranked in the wind. So it was much easier for Alex to make some carpaccio with calamari rings from the 82cm makreel and the calamar I had reeled in. And you'd have as much electricity as you could ever use, quite enough to watch a movie. It was the first time in the captains life to find himself at navigating the seas while sitting in front of a big flatscreen TV watching a movie. For the fun of it we watched another one after dinner.
With the boat now moving very calmly we got another problem. It came out of the air. And it was shit for the boat, literally. Dozens of seabirds now used our boat as their primary sleeping place. With a thick steel cable running between the two masts, it was their ideal night's resting place. Everything beneath was full of bird's poo the next morning. And, as we were still moving on deck, we had poo fall on us frequently as well. That unpleasanty had quickly started us thinking of mean ways to get rid of the birds and what in the boat would be suitable and so unnecessary that we could shoot it at our uninvited new passengers. So far, we had found nothing, but the quest continued.
captains log:
0340 light E
0400 calamar
0640 off E, up fock E 3kn
undo 1st reef
bread is finished, start pancakes
install 12V charger
1100 start engine SE 4kn
1200 E49°20 S02°42 -- 93nm
see our first film "Edison Force", shit of US
see our 2. film
2100 change tack, wind E 4kn
loose one rapalla
turn engine 1350rpm
E[ngine]=70.75[hours]
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