Mike's Exciting Day 3 Update!

Light, lighter, none. Lighter, none, light. Lighter, none, none. None,
light, lighter. I'm describing our wind today.

In the middle of the afternoon, Bob decided he could out-swim the boat. So
he dived in and took off. He was able to keep up with the boat for a few
minutes but it was close to full-speed swimming so he didn't last very long.
He made a few tries at swimming a circle around the boat but never made it.
It seemed like every time he tried, we got a puff of wind that shoved the
boat a little faster than his stroke.

If you are wondering, we were dragging a rope in case he needed to grab it
while he was swimming. We were slow enough he didn't need it.

We had pancakes for breakfast, fruits for lunch, and a fancy fruit/veggie
salad for supper. Then we ate freshly baked bread later in the evening (I
used yeast this time). Sounds healthy. We need to eat healthy in order to
offset our daily intake of the "Four C's" (cookies, cakes, colas, and
candy).

Fishing was a lot more normal today. We let the lines out in the morning.
When it got dark we pulled the lines in.

We use a lot of water on this boat. We have a watermaker that uses some kind
of hocus-pocus to make water. To run the watermaker we have to run the
generator. It makes 20-some gallons an hour. We were expecting to need to
run the generator extra just for watermaking.

We also use a lot of electricity on this boat. When we bought this boat, we
wanted a lot of solar panels. It had four on it, and we wanted 8-10. The
boat salesman (David) told us that four was plenty. We told him that we
didn't turn off lights all that well. And that we normally had computers
running, and cameras and stuff charging, and breadmakers cooking, and
printers and radios on, and so forth. We ended up settling for six.

"David the boat salesman" is the same as "David our boat-mate for this
crossing." He seems a little surprised at how often we have to run the
generator. But I think he's already given up on trying to control electrical
usage. At this point, we only need to make water about 20% of the time that
we run the generator. I'll try to keep you updated on this interesting
statistic.

When the wind is "light, lighter, none" on this boat I observed two things.
One, there's a lot of time to do whatever we want since sailing takes about
1-2 minutes of every hour. In other words, if we divide the workload evenly,
every five hours each of us needs to sail for 1-2 minutes. Two, the other
people on the boat are a little more edgy when the boat speed is 0.7 knots
than they are when the boat speed is 7.0 knots.

Actually, it was an extremely relaxing, pleasant environment. If we were not
trying to go fast we would have been completely enjoyable. (of course, I was
able to completely enjoy myself since I've never been edgy)

There is one other thing I observed. When we got the position report of the
other boats it showed that the ones that chose the southern route made good
time. We are taking the northern route and we made really bad time. When the
other people read that report they were somewhat more edgy (maybe even a tad
cranky).

Arts and Entertainment:

Bob broke out the piano. We had entertainment live from the cockpit off and
on throughout the afternoon and evening. And into the night .

Ps. This was Bob's last day to be younger than 50.