Shoal mates

Still no wind! Much of yesterday was spent ghosting along in just 4-5 knots of breeze, and then when that got too frustrating, we would whack on the motor until the wind appeared to pick up again. I say appeared because it seems to be a universal rule of the sea that as soon as you put a sail up the wind dies and, conversely, as soon as you start motoring the wind increases.

The lack of wind did give us an opportunity to tackle the penguin sanctuary. The freezer has been working overtime trying to keep our celebratory “half-way” steaks frozen, and a side effect of all this hard work is that the thin pipe leading from the compressor to the freezer had become a thick sausage of ice. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem if the tube hadn’t decided to annexe some of the adjacent electrical wiring into its icy world. A hair dryer resolved the immediate problem but to prevent it happening again, the freezer tube needed to be lagged. We had a random foam camping mat kicking around, waiting for the “one day that might be useful” opportunity. A few snip, snips with the scissors and an inordinate amount of cable ties later, the pipe was lagged. It sounds easy but the access would have challenged a gynaecologist, and they don’t normally have to perform their operations standing on their head in a sauna. I’m pleased to report that the exercise was a complete success, although it does mean our chilly locker is now no longer quite so chilly, and so should we happen to stumble into a penguin looking for a lift back to the southern hemisphere, we no longer have anywhere to store it.

Although the hoped for breaching whales didn’t put in an appearance, we did acquire a small fish. When we were changing sails the night before Jacob had mentioned that there was a small fish swimming alongside the boat, and then yesterday afternoon, there it was again. It’s only about 20cm long with a lovely yellow tail and it seems to have to work very hard to keep up with the boat, but it’s still there. Small fish normally live in shoals and so I commented to Jacob and Richard that it might have lost its companions. Jacob’s immediate response was, “perhaps we’re its shoal mate!” What a lovely thought.