Celebrate good times

Yesterday we celebrated passing the halfway mark. For those paying attention you will know that we passed the halfway stage on Saturday evening but we didn’t want to jump the gun. That would be like opening your Christmas presents on Christmas Eve, which, as we all know, is naughty. So how do you celebrate on a 15-metre boat (OK, 14.79 metres) in the middle of the ocean? Well firstly you go for a swim. The water temperature is just over 28 degrees Centigrade, which is warmer than our pool at home. It is also significantly deeper than our pool! It is a strange feeling being in the water with nothing under your toes other than 5 kilometres of blue water.
However it isn’t the depth that’s unnerving, it’s the fact that Shepherd Moon is so eager to continue her progress westwards, she just won’t stop. Despite taking all the sails down she was still drifting at around 1.7 knots. That’s only slightly slower than I swim. I wore a mask so I could check the rudder and propeller and discovered we have a micro-shoal of fish beneath the boat. Not long and sleek like “yellow-tail” who swims alongside, but flatter and more ovoid in shape. Where do they live when there isn’t a boat passing by? Anyway, we all swam and no one was left behind and so all was good.

We followed the swim with showers. I realise this wouldn’t normally make it into “100 ways to celebrate before you die”, but when you’re on a boat with limited water you have to ration the amount you use. So there we were, refreshed from our swim, even more refreshed from our showers, and then the weather decided to join in our celebration. The wind arrived. Not too much to deal with, but enough to make Shepherd Moon race along. Being Sunday we sang along to hymns on the CD with varying degrees of tunefulness.

Giant T-bone steaks provided the finale to our day of celebrations. We had bought what we thought would be modest sized steak portions from the local butcher in Las Palmas. They turned out to be anything but modest. The three of them together would make up a significant portion of a cow, certainly enough for it to notice. They were served with peppercorn sauce (which required an urgent email to Daisy for the recipe), fried onions and sauteed potatoes. Despite their daunting size, we ended up with three clean plates (apart from the T-bones which were lobbed into the sea for our fishy friends). So all in all it was a great day. Perhaps we need to celebrate when we are two thirds of the way there. That’s tomorrow!