Life at sea – 4

It is now more than 48h since the wind vanished and left us alone in the
middle of the ocean with our useless sails. In order not to roll much
in the remaining waves we turned on the engine and progressed at 3.5
knots directly towards Martinique. After the lighting and heavy rains of
the previous days, it is a blessing to bath in the tropical sun and
sleep all what we need without any other interruptions than our shifts.

In addition to sunbathing, we actually found many other advantages to
our current situation. As the engine is producing loads of energy, we
can use all lights at night, watch movies on the computer during our
night shifts, run the auto-pilot 24h/day, charge our mobile phones and
mp3 players... As the waves progressively disappeared as well, the
kitchen became once again a decent working place. We took advantage of
it to make some more gastronomic experiments such as cheek peas
mini-pancakes, spice bread, crab and tuna croquettes, lemon and almonds
creams,... Unfortunately we are really unlucky with fishing and we
haven't caught a single fish since we left from Cape Verde. There hasn't
been any flying fish on the deck for many days either. As we were
wondering about the reason for this lack of fish, we decided today to
dive around the boat and have a look around. We can now confirm that the
ocean is deep (4700m) and that there are no fish around us. They must be
hiding deep down in the cooler water, out of reach from our fishing lines!!

Despite the fact that we feel alone in the whole world, we saw a few
boats passing by. One of them, a Swedish family on a 14m sailing boat,
took radio contact with us on Thursday night. We had a very pleasant
conversation and we discovered that they would like to come back to
Sweden through Greenland, just as l'Olonnois plans to do. We exchanged
email addresses after promising each other to exchange tips about that
part of the trip!

This afternoon, a bit tired of the engine's sweet music, we decided to
take a break: we turned off the engine and stopped right in the middle
of nowhere. After a little swim around the boat, we decided to extend
this moment "out of time" with a drink in front of the sunset, a spice
bread and foie-gras dinner and a movie before restarting the engine. The
water is so calm around us that we truly had the impression to be
moored in a well protected bay. The stars are reflecting on the surface
and it is almost possible to watch the shooting stars in the sea instead
of in the sky. It is unbelievable what can happen in the middle of an ocean!

Eloise