22°44' W
0700 UT
19.2.08
_______________________________
apparently, so i have read, convention now dictates that GMT is actually UT; i was wondering what the spanish and french called greenwich mean time, and now that i think about it, even when i was a kid sitting by the shortwave radio in gimli the clock man used to say Universal Standard Time at the sound of the long tone. or perhaps i am making that one up. but that's what i think. i'll do some more thinking on that one.
mexican theme for supper tonight. nachos, zingy salsa and fajitas. yum. lots of food and it's a good thing that nobody is expecting to get a date out here, as the garlic quotient for this salsa is rather high. chef jenny has this gimmick that i have been using whereby the centre bit of the garlic is removed, defusing the nose-bomb part of it. that's what the mythology says, and so far i believe it. i have been making food with plenty of garlic since i have been here and since i started doing the middle removing bit, nobody's said tickety-boo (...they would say that, being brits and all) about how strong anything is.
one the one hand, it makes me think that the good part of the garlic is in there. maybe not. maybe that's how they get the non-stinky garlic pills and that. so for the salsa i manufactured with whole garlic and it's powerful. and it has been commented that it's spicy, though i hadn't thought of the garlic as a spice per se. it's also relly zingy as i used a whole wack of lime juice. mmm. during my watch i finished off all the dinner leftovers, and had a dipping sauce made from crème frâiche and the Tremendously Zingy Salsa. yum and yum.
finally got rid of the diesel scented room freshener. the luxury cabin in which i have been sleeping, and it is luxury (no sarcasm, this is where the owner of the yacht sleeps when aboard), but is located over the portside diesel fuel tank and over the onboard diesel generator fuel tank. flying cloud has solar panels that generate enough electricity to run everything [deep freeze, refrigerators, communication and navigational toys, as well as autopilot, lights, the water maker and all that jazz] especially when we're in the tropics, but probably not everything all at once all day.
so there's a generator to top things up. it's not great for batteries to go down to 45% charge or lower, and so what we're looking for is to maintain a nearly full charge most of the time. and cap'n m is rather organized about this, one might almost say organized in the hyphenated a/r kind of way. but that's why we like him best, because he's totally on top of these kinds of things. and water levels, and cooking gas levels, food quantities and so on. he sleeps through movies, talking, music playing and all sorts of nonsense, or claims to; he wakes up of the sound of the engine changes, when the wind shift alarm goes off, or when there's suddenly no apparent wind because someone accidentally tacked if they perhaps tried to sheet in the solent (as heading up and then unintentionally backwinding the headsail tends to force the boat through head-to-wind onto the opposite tack) but pulled the traveler instead of the solent sheet seeing as it was dark and all that and also catamarans are notoriously difficult to tack until they are moving at better than 4 knots and maybe trying to tack 3 or 4 times in order to figure that out and get back to a point of sail that actually gets the boat closer to gibraltar (hypothetically speaking, of course).
ahem, also an effective teacher, able to see what the person learning does understand, and what steps to take to get a more complete understanding of the concept across; willing in some instances to allow problems to be solved by experimentation when there's no great rush, and no real risk created by the problem solving process. somewhat socratic, though no toga and no hemlock. there is a certain madness in the method. seems to work so far.
MD looking slightly blurry.
i started watch tonight / this morning, somewhat disappointed that it was entirely overcast. no sky watching for me. so i watched the sea and that was fine. learned a bit more about the nav thingy, and finally found a solution for the glare. there's a night mode for the outdoor nav screen, which would have been useful last week. alas. now we've got a waxing moon, nearly full and setting after the end of my watch. the prime star viewing will be on the early watches after sunset if at all, and there'll be a moon in the sky until we're in the carribean.
it's still a great view, and not boring at all. i theorize that it wears off on some people, but those are the people that don't really like doing boat runs to kenora after the second or third week at camp. they always said that the romance wears off, but i haven't noticed.
thinking tonight about when i was an intermediate and we paddled with johnny the pee from buoy to buoy so that we could read the letters and numbers to confirm our position; apparently he wasn't much of a navigator before he was a 6 week tripper. we ate floating TL rafted up and moored with one foot on Birdshit Island. i know that's what it's really called because my counsellor johnny the pee told me so. it's north of whiskey island in the middle of manitou strait there sort of if you come out of holmstrom's marsh and are headed toward pebble beach on scotty's. we were headed to pebble from canyon i bet through holmstrom's marsh and it was in a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth; in the paleolithic age we actually had canvas tents, ate 'scuz eggs' and klik for breakfast, could camp at welcome channel (though we didn't when i was in manitou) and sang crazy stuff like 'O the Lord is good to me' and Y-M-C-A rah rah rah. what i was thinking is that it seemed like we were one the water for a real long time and that sterning that canoe when i was 11 across manitou strait was pretty cool because it was really far. and it was overcast.
