We have finally made landfall in Falmouth, England. Our voyage from Saint Martin took 11 days. We covered 3000 odd nautical miles and made one stop. The trip was not uneventful so let me get crazy with bullet points and we shall begin.
- Weather; Compared with the sublime weather we had on the way to the Caribbean this journey was a bit more bracing. There were some calculated risks taken with regards to the weather and I am happy to say arrived in Falmouth safely and ahead of schedule. The gradual change in the temperature was quite noticeable when you have spent 6 months in a tropical climate. As was the change in the water colour. The Atlantic gets grayer further north you go. This is probably something to do with plankton density or other scientific malarkey.
Proof(Photos are from South to North top to bottom)(<–Deliberately confusing sentence)
- Beard growing; Loveyjoy and I grew beards on the way over. Being only 21 and English James took a weeks head start on me. I did enjoy having a beard to keep my face warm but after a 10 year beard sabbatical, sadly I am still not much of a beard grower. I think it is my demigod heritage, real immortals are hairless. The final straw were orange hairs starting to sprout from my upper lip. The beard died this morning. RIP. More proof I am in fact descended from gods. The hairs on my chin were almost indestructible. I had to remove several layers of skin to purge my face of the transatlantic beard scourge.
- A real scare; I remain convinced that walking around a boat in the dead of night in the middle of an ocean is one of the scariest things a person can do.
scary deck at night
- That is unless your crew mates conspired to give you a terrible fright. The first mate and I devised a devious plan to scare Lovejoy. After our watch change over at 4am we turned off a deck light and went and hid by the light switch. We did scare James sufficiently but I hid myself so well it took me a good 30 seconds to extricate myself from the hiding spot. My contribution to the scare was more of a congratulatory handshake as I stretched my legs.
- Whale spotting; High speed whale watching remains a fringe sport. By the time a dedicated lookout sees and announces a whale over radio the whale is almost out of sight. That didn’t stop me from sighting a whale and taking some very murky photos of the said whale expelling air in a friendly fashion.
- Ocean sanding;When I was not whale watching, scaring, beard growing or sleeping I spent a few hours a day sanding. I sanded every day bar two. Sanding at sea is an aquired taste, as is the chairs I was sanding. I am not sure what else to say about this but if sanding chairs over a few thousand miles is on your bucket list replace it with beard growing or something else more exciting.
- Horta and the Azores; We did take one pitstop on our trip. The Azores are one of those far fetched places that sailors only ever visit. A Portuguese archipelago they have the distinction of being in the middle of the Atlantic where there not much else. Being there for only 6 hours or so I did not have much time to explore other than the inside of a cafe which had very tasty red wine. It also had some Danish sailors singing very poor renditions of sea shanties.
That is it for now. Obviously we are in undiscovered territory at the moment and once I find my star trek translator I will be beaming down onto the Cornish coast for some bold discovery or something like that.
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