Monotony

Eight days into the crossing, we haven't seen the sunshine yet. We are
wearing long pants and sweater and we are in the South Atlantic, in the
summer by 12 degrees of latitude South. This is probably what they mean
by global warming.
But the good news is that we have now covered 1202 miles over the ground
and have closed in on Cabedelo by 1128 miles.
The first day, we went tacking, then for three days we went on close
haul, then we spent another three days under gennaker, and we are now
Wing on Wing, full main and full genoa, steaming along at 7.5 knots.
The worry is what lies ahead. It looks like by the day after tomorrow,
we are going to hit a patch of very light wind that might last for three
days. And there is no obvious way to go around it, either north or
south. So we are going to go north so that once in the light wind, we
won't have the wind right behind us and we should be able to do 5 or 6
knots under Gennaker.
Yesterday was the end of the bread that we had bought in Lobito.
Actually, it was stale and Olivier prepared it like "French toast",
soaking the bread in milk and eggs and frying them in a pan. Turned out
quite good.
The days go on, three hours on, three hours off, no excitement. When we
were still close to Africa, we say a few whales, sharks, dolphins and
sea turtles. But now that we are in the middle of the pond (we just
passed 240 miles north of St Helena), there is almost no life. A few
flying fish, some of them landing on deck at night, the occasional bird,
and that's it.
I can't stay at the computer for too long, with an overcast sky the
solar panels don't produce much and the computer burns 4 amps. So, we
get very busy doing nothing, which is not very exciting. And we have
another two weeks to go. The Indian Ocean had more diversity.