In follow up to yesterday’s fresh water pump problems I ended up having to make two more journeys into the engine room last night, as the water pump again stopped working. On the last, and seventh trip into the engine room I was so fed up that I decided to dig a new relay out of my spare parts locker and swapped out the old relay from Trinidad. Sure enough, what I had assumed were dodgy connections to the old relay, as the pump would stay running when I giggled the relay, turned out to be a bad relay. On closer inspection the old relay does not appear to be a sealed unit, so I’m assuming it is suffering internal corrosion as was the ground speed-connector. In any case, the 7th time was lucky, as it has now worked and the crew have had showers to stress test it. I’ve added relays to the spare parts shopping list to replaced the spare just used.
This morning I trimmed the moldy bits off the last end-slice of the store bought bread and had it for breakfast, even though it had a strange taste. Hope I don’t start hallucinating from the mold, lol. That “meal” was irritating enough to motivate me to bake bread for the first time since the last Trans-Atlantic.
So I got out the hard flour brought on board in the Canaries back in January 2024 and am making homemade bread for the crew. I’m not quite sure the sealed yeast is still alive after being exposed to high heat in the outboard galley locker. The sunshine on the blue hull warms everything up quite a bit, but the dough is rising and the convection oven is pre-heated to 220°c.
I’ve placed the bread, in its baking tin, inside a plastic bag, in the engine room to rise, as it is warm in there from the generator running. This is a trick I developed in the last trans-Atlantic.
Tonight, to celebrate finally getting under 600 miles to go, we are going to make roast port tenderloins, with roast potatoes, roast onions, gravy and red cabbage, assuming we find a recipe for red cabbage when we fire up the Starlink in a bit. I might even dig a bottle of Rioja, bought at Hyper Dino in the Canaries, out of ship’s stores. The challenge will be having to hold onto one’s wine glass with one hand while eating holding your fork in the other. This rules out using your knife and fork at the same time, so we will need to ensure the roast is sufficiently tender so as to not need a knife!
The wind has veered around as forecast to the North-West so we jibed the boat last night and are now on a port tack beam reach doing 6-7 knots VMG on 88° towards Ponta Delgada in 12 kts of apparent wind. Ponta Delgada is 58o nautical miles away. Our best guess of ETA is Thursday-ish, May 8th.
