Tuesday, June 4, 2013

UFO on Papy Jovial

UFO stands for Unexpected Flying Object. We are again tacking in a shorter seas as we have reached the continental shelf and the boat is slamming in the water like crazy. It even succeeded in launching upward the step down transformer which allows us to use 240 volts european current. This thing weighs a lot and was thrown upward from the top of a closet where it has lived without problem since Australia in March 2010. Once in the air, the boat moved quickly sideways and the transformer landed against the door to the forward toilet and then landed on the floor with a very loud bang. I am afraid that it might not work again as the landing was very hard. We will only know once we try to connect to shore power and we are not looking forward to spending time without shore power which we use for heating and hot water.
This morning, we sailed through a fishing ground off shore of south Britanny. The seas were alll green, almost bright green and beautiful. We are also beginning to cross the shipping lanes and the screen of the computer is covered of little icons produced by the AIS (Automatic Identification System), showing all the different boats in our area,with their name, destination, speed, how far they wil be from us at the closest point, etc . . . It is a fantastic and very useful device, especially since all commercial boats of more than 300 tons have to have an AIS transmitter so that we can see them on our AIS receiver. At 5 p.m. today, we just crossed the 100 miles to Aber Wrach on the north coast of Britanny. But this tacking progression is agonizingly slow.
There is still a possibility that we would reaxh the mouth of the river on the 8th and therefore be in Rouen on the 9th. It will be tight and we only have the 10 hours up the river to clean and dry the boat. We have guests coming on the 10 and on the 11th, and right now, the boat is hardly liveable, even for us. It is wet everywhere, water showing up on the side in the galley and forward. We do our best to clear it, but the boat is so flat that it is almost impossible. Obviously,charlie Morgan designed the boat with the assumption that it would neverr heel and always sail upright. Like motoring in the Bahamas or sailing downwind with less than 14 knots of wind.
At noon today, we were by 47:54 N and 7:22 W. The direct distance to Le havre was 322 miles. All this tacking only got us 69 miles closer than yesterday, but in the same time, we covered 134 miles over the ground. As I was saying yesterday, we had to cover more than twice what we gain towards the destination.
We are hoping that when we get into the protection from shore, life on board will become a little less miserable with less jerky movements, a little less cold and even maybe we will be able to take advantage of the spring sun.


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