2359 (AST, GMT-4) 14 May 2018
Dear All,
Thank you for all your whistling! The wind eventually arrived in the early hours of Monday morning and with great relief we switched off the engine at 0540AST. The peace and quiet was bliss!
Since around lunchtime we've been stonking along at about 6.5knots through the water, pushed along by a lovely 13knots south-southwesterly breeze. We've also got about a knot of push from a helpful current so, overall we're making about 7.5knots towards our destination. And the sun has been shining all day on a beautiful blue sea - life is good.
I have been chef today and, with our bread supplies running low, I made the first loaf of our passage. Clearly, from my perspective it is a masterpiece that would grace the shop window of any boulangerie in Paris. However, we shall have to see how the self-elected judge of the Great BV Bake-off assesses it at breakfast. Standby for a full report on her response tomorrow.
Hi All, Nicky here now. The chef's asleep leaving me with the update and, as the saying goes, whilst the cat's away the mice will play and I'm getting bored with writing backlog blog entries!
Since Reg started talking about bread, I'll continue the food theme. Feel free to ignore this and skip to the vital statistics for the day but it is something I'd like to record for the blog and our future reference. As you can imagine, food is one of the long distance sailor's main topics of interest. Well, that and the continued correct functioning of the marine heads (toilet) - not topics to mix in the same blog post!
So, what have we been eating on board for the past 8 days or so? We provisioned in Culebra which probably wasn't the best place to provision but certainly wasn't the worst. And we already had a lot of good store cupboard stuff on board so that made things quite easy. One of the supermarkets in the town has an excellent butchery department, so we bought a kilo of minced beef and a whole chicken and we already had some pork loin on board which we had bought in St Croix and vacuum packed. Fresh fruit and veg were my real concern, particularly as the American VIs way is to heavily refrigerate fresh food, but the veggies have all lasted surprisingly well, given that they were virtually frozen when I bought them!
Before we set off, Reg did a mammoth cook-in and conjured up a large bolognaise sauce and pork casserole and a one meal chicken in white wine sauce (we used the brown chicken meat in that dish and vacuum packed the breasts). This meant that we had the makings of at least 7 meals for the passage. We keep the food going en route by rotating which sauce we cook each day, and by making sure that we cook all of, say, the bolognaise, even if we only eat a small amount of it.
Breakfasts underway are mostly fruit and yoghurt followed by bread and jam/Nutella/marmite. We started off with a watermelon which lasted us for 4 breakfasts. Now we're onto apples and oranges, supplemented by some tinned fruit for variety. We also have porridge on board for those cooler mornings at sea (bought in Gibraltar and not used yet!) and I snuck some maple syrup on board to liven up the porridge as well as some bacon and eggs which could be used for 'treat' breakfasts or the makings of lunch (BLT, egg sandwiches...). As we're only 8 days in and the weather's been good, treat meals aren't really required yet.
Lunches are leftover main meals or sandwiches or wraps. We set off with leftover pasta, broccoli and cheese bake (one lunch) and leftover Spanish omelette (2 lunches with salad on the side). Then we started on the wraps.... I've found these invaluable. They seem to last forever (let's not ask about the ingredients list!) and with a little mayo and/or mustard sauce smeared on, you can add any combination of cheese, tinned tuna/mackerel, dried sausage and salad/coleslaw and make a tasty lunch which, mostly, won't dissolve if a huge wave drowns the cockpit at an inconvenient time. I did buy some baked beans in Gibraltar which made for some very easy ‘emergency’ lunches but those are now long gone. I also have plenty of tinned tomatoes on board and white beans so if it gets colder there are options for tomato soup and butternut squash soup too. (Butternut squash, like cabbage is fab as it lasts forever!).
Dinners we've sort of already mentioned but that's not the full picture.
Day 1: I cooked pasta bolognaise. BV was on her ear rather as we rushed along with the wind on the beam and a bit of a sea running. First day out and not such great cooking conditions, this is exactly what those pre-prepared meals are designed for. My mistake was to trial cooking the pasta in part seawater and part fresh. I had no need to as we had loads of fresh water on board but other long-distance sailors recommend it to save water so I thought I'd give it a go. Verdict: thumbs down. Far too salty for my palette and it rather ruined the meal for me.
Day 2: Reg cooked the pork casserole with pasta and broccoli. Nothing fancy for all the same reasons as Day 1. A good meal. Just before he served, we got a small fish on the line. Reg gutted it and popped it in a box in the fridge for....
....Day 3: I turned the fish into fish and chips (and broccoli). The chips or as we call them 'Áheat's chips' are chunks of potato, fried from raw in a non-stick frying pan. We use a tin foil lid to start with and then finish off browning them without the lid. And, as a piece de resistance, I made tartar sauce (mayo with chopped cornichons/gherkins and capers). As you may have guessed, by day 3 sailing conditions were a lot calmer than previously!
Day 4: Reg caught a Skipjack tuna so, in a break from tradition, we had tuna carpaccio for lunch and then enormous tuna steaks and garlic mash for dinner. Mmmm-mmm. The remaining 4+kg of tuna fillet we vacuum packed. Perhaps I'll use some tomorrow.
Day 5: Needing to do stuff with down some of the pre-prepped food, I heated the pork casserole and the chicken as well as all the bolognaise and used some of the latter to make a lasagne. Admittedly, a lasagne with layers of pasta twists rather than sheets of lasagne (I had forgotten to buy a replacement pack of lasagne) but it worked well nonetheless. And, yes, it was calm enough to make a béchamel sauce!
Day 6: Reg reprised the pork casserole. This time with potatoes and the addition of chilli flakes in the casserole. And he used up the last of the courgette too.
Day 7: I added some rehydrated dried mushrooms and a little UHT cooking cream to the chicken in white wine sauce and served it with a mixture of basmati and wild rice. The UHT cream is another thing that has lasted from the Canaries. I bought half a dozen small pots there (they keep in the store locker) as they had the most amazingly long shelf life. Whatever they've done to it so that it lasts on the shelf, it works even when the pot's open. We actually opened the pot that I used on Sunday a good 2 weeks ago and it's still absolutely fine!
Day 8 (tonight): Reg reprised the pork casserole (again) this time adding Worcestershire sauce, tomato puree and some herbs to make it taste entirely different. He also added the last of the aubergine and some green peppers and served it with pasta and the end result was absolutely nothing like the enormous pork casserole that sat cooling on deck 9 days ago. It was just as tasty, just hugely different.
Our 'problem' now is that we have far too much food in the fridge and only (probably) 2 more nights at sea. Tomorrow we may have burritos or maybe I'll do something with the tuna - perhaps in wraps too. On the plus side, since we have already cleared customs into the USA in Puerto Rico so we don't need to worry about finishing all the fresh fruit, veg and meat before we arrive (or hurling it over the side 25nm out). That would be a total waste of Sammy the Skipjack and if that were a concern, well, maybe we'd have to think about slowing down and staying out here for, ooh, another week or so, so that we could eat it all before we arrive!
There is a lot more that I could say about food and provisioning but that's more than enough for now, if only because otherwise this will take ages to send on our very slow HF radio link. And, as BV's buzzing along nicely under sail, I suppose I should take some interest in things outside. Long may this breeze continue!
Reg and Nicky
Passage statistics:
Position at midday 14 May: N33 03 W72 51
Position at 2359 14 May: N34 18 W73 46
Midday to midday distance: 130 nautical miles
Midnight to Midnight distance: 144 nautical miles
Total miles covered: 1083 nautical miles
Approximate distance to go: 178 nautical miles
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| End of Day 8 - Caribbean towards Chesapeake |
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