43° 38' 45" N
22° 08' 30" W
06.05.08
0650 GMT
s/y flying cloud
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whale spout.
jenny said it was the biggest one she'd ever seen; that's what she said. also the only one i'd ever seen so therefore true for me also. it appeared to be coming toward us ~ or across our bow at any rate. then 30 seconds of nothing, so i went beck inside to continue enjoying my delicious repast. boiled egg, fresh from açores com queijo on a rice-cake, lightly toasted. the eggs are from 'happy chickens' i think, as the sign in M.A.Y.S. said.
i think i'd been in horta for nearly a week when i decided to pop into mid-atlantic yacht services to ask if they knew who may was and where i might find her shop. oops. that's when i saw the sign, and their book exchange. the object of my quest. i got 'conan the barbarian' in trade for the Jorge Amado thing that showed up in the Skullduggery book shelf in Antigua. i think MAYS won on that one. but you know. i was in the mood for something... light and fluffy.
today was a good day for the learning curve ~ put away the gennaker with tom. strategic error. oop. we put out the solent just fine, and then went down 40° just fine, but then i didn't waitand just dove into the furling business. the solent crash gybed and matthew popped out to lend assistance / make sure everything was okay / give me hell for not waiting until the course chage was complete / give me hell for not diving back to the helm as soon as i noticed the headsail even think about moving. i was pretty un-ruffled by the whole process and had been quite concerned to not hourglass the gennaker*; on our vessel the main isn't really ever out all that far and and would not be a gigantic deal, i decided, to gybe and the solent is a self-tacker as well. matthew said as much, but having been an instructor and recognizing that a person learns mistakes as they repeat mistakes ~ the same maneuver would be quite dangerous on a different vessel (except we're not on a different vessel) ~ especially on a monohull. the gennaker is still away.
and the flavour of hell is generally a rather mild one - i get more grief about coffee grounds that appeared on the last passage (and miraculously hid until reappearing while on charter) than that. all in, a good exercise to put the gen away and i look forward to doing it (or perhaps anything else this week) right for once.
