Hello again. So, after I stopped writing to you I went to bed. I was still asleep when we weighed anchor at three o’clock and was only woken up five minutes after my watch started. For some reason John and David never remember to wake me up before ten o’clock. The deal usually is, you wake the next person up twenty minutes before you go off watch. During my watch we finally managed to get the genoa up. The genoa by the way is the smaller sail at the front of the boat, the mainsail is the one on the mast. We had a lot of wind, up to thirty knots, so we managed to reach nine knots over the ground. It started getting rougher so we put the sail down but we gained a lot of time on that stretch. We had dolphins today, but not for long and we didn’t manage to get any pictures. After I came off watch the sea state became really unpleasant, its calmed down a bit now but we’ve spent the last seven hours dodging flying pieces of kit and cutlery and then putting them back. I’m writing this in Dad’s bunk because if you sit on the normal benches you fall forward and knock yourself out on the table, you also lose the laptop. Dad showed me how to alter the sensitivity, the shutter speed and the amount of light that is let in to the sensor on the D5 camera. I’ve used it before but because I didn’t know how to change any of the aforementioned settings none of the pictures are very good. A couple of hours ago Dad managed to knock the on/off switch on the nav system and turned the autopilot off. So we spent a merry few minutes trying to get the boat back on track, which we did manage but it was irritating. Water is leaking into the bilges from an unknown source and since the aft bilge pump isn’t working, its been steadily filling up with water. Dad and Dave had a look earlier and decided that it would be a good idea to try and pump the aft bilge manually. We have a long tube attached to the shower sump pump in the toilet and we can reach that through onto the aft bilge. So I spent half an hour pumping that until we decided that we’d got enough water out. This means that for the first time in a week, when the boat tips we don’t hear water washing around in the bilges. Yaaaaaaaay. This time on the trip we have a bread maker. This is because bread is one of the things that it turns out is really very sought after on a boat and because it goes mouldy quickly you can’t take it. We’ve used it quite a few times so far and while it works well and produces good bread, I have found that I can’t stand the smell of it cooking. Which is odd because we have a bread maker at home and I love the smell of that baking. So, a mystery. According to various clever bits of kit on the nav table, we should reach Lerwick by seven in the evening tomorrow. At the moment we’ve just left the top of Scotland at Cape Wrath and the sea state is terrible. I’ll write again when we’re in Lerwick, bye.
01249 715566