Motor was off at midnight and then back on at 0330. Coffee, toast and peanut butter was served at 0730 while Armon slept. We read a couple of emails from home. All good news.
1100: Time for breakfast - as you may have figured out - Armon hits the rack around 0600 and we wait until he wakes up before I make a real breakfast. So breakfast is really brunch and lunch has become a mere snack.
Time to use up some oranges and grapefruit so I turn the inventor on and make us each a glass of fresh juice. Once breakfast was out of the way I decided to boil some potatoes and eggs for potato salad that would go with the ribs. This was another recipe that had to be altered in order to make use of the pressure cooker. No real recipe - just like at home - emptied out a bunch of jars of stuff and voila!
Cutting up the potatoes for the potato salad brought back another nostalgic moment. Frozen french fries were a rare event in the Vesala household. Even on those rare paydays when Mom would buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried chicken, she would bring it home, put the chicken on a rack in the oven and then make home made fries. Us girls would compete as to who got to use the nifty wareever chip cutter. One of the few things we were actually allowed to do in Mom’s kitchen.
It is amazing that all of us turned into such good cooks as the kitchen was Mom/s domain. Just like the galley is mine!
1200 Noon Position: 3* 8’N 122* 48’ W
Course 190 - 195 Winds nosily at 190
Seas rippled with large swells at 10 - 12 feet
Mainly blue skies with scatter cumulus on the horizon
SOG 5.0 knots with the motor
Distance Travelled in 24 Hours: 110 nm
Total Distance Travelled to Date: 1680
No usable wind for the next 24 hours so we were motoring. The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) stretches across the equator and is the place where the North Pacific Trade Winds and the South Pacific Trade Winds meet. As you might guess - the two sets of winds can cancel each other out so you get a mixture of no winds or squalls. At present this zone is snaking along the Equator and is presently north of it - which is where we are. Consequently we are motoring. Also know as the Doldrums, this area can be very narrow or very wide - sometimes over 50 nm. We are lucky as this band that we have passed through was only a couple of hundred nm and we were across it in just over two days. We talked to other boaters later and some of them crossed this area five times!
Mr. Diesel ran exceptionally well through this section and we couldn’t be happier. We are not burning any oil, engine is purring like a kitten and are maintaining 5 knots at 1400 rpm. David and Armon transferred the rest of the diesel from the very cans into the main tank. From David’s estimation this means that are tanks are almost full - giving us a capacity to cover roughly 600 nm if we had to.
It has been a good day with the salt water showers for me! Ribs in the pressure cooker turned out just like the ones Mom used to make on those Sundays when we would all go out to Batchewana for the day - swimming and eating. We often had the beach to ourselves - sometimes the Elsby’s would come - but people just would not want to drive the hour to the Provincial campground and pay the user fee of $1.00 . I went out there the last time I was home and the daily user fee is no!w $16.00! Now that is an expensive swim.
Right now I cannot wait to get to the Marquesas and go swimming again. I just do not understand why David will not allow me to jump off the boat out here! I guess he is afraid that there might be sharks following us. Tough we have not seen any evidence of sharks or whales since we left. Even the dolphins have left us. Except for the booby birds, some terns and those flying fish the ocean appears empty.
And so ends another day!
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