Feb 7-8, Bad Eggs
The eggs we bought on St. Helena have already gone bad…they probably sat on some hot wharf in Cape Town for 24 hours before being loaded onto the ship, then were put into refrigeration on St. Helena. Ironically, chicken feed is so expensive on St. Helena that they don’t do any kind of commercial egg production there. So, it was a bit of a blow to our fresh food supply. Now that we’ve discovered a dozen bad ones, the rest are looking pretty suspicious and unappetizing. S/V “Beguine” told us they’d seen a French catamaran in Durban with a chicken coop bolted to the transom including several crowing roosters. I don’t know what would be worse–cleaning a chicken coop at sea, or dealing with the occasional bad egg…either way I’m not in the mood for lunch right now!
Our winds have picked up and we’ve been moving along under 1st reef sails. Mileage has been in the 130’s range for the past few days, and the seas are still gentle enough that we can sail with all hatches & ports wide open. How kind the South Atlantic has been to us! We are closing in on the equator. Nights are hot and staying around 89F through the night.
It’s almost a dead-downwind run to our waypoint at the equator, so we are sailing a combo of wing-on-wing and starboard tack. We don’t want to stay too far to the west once we hit the ITCZ, otherwise we’ll just have extra miles to cover in the NE trades. Better to lollygag along down here while the getting is good and easy. There’s also a mid-ocean rock pile called “Penedos De Sao Pedro E Sau Paulo” which we want to keep downwind and down-current of.
A bit more polishing here, reading some books and articles there, easy watches, easy miles.
