Still at sea

Day 8 

It is 0330 and I am star gazing. It is the clearest night we have had yet and I turned on the ap on our IPad for identifying th stars. I can pick out about 5 constellations without any problem but I hope to be able to identify more. 

The coloured planet is Jupiter and Virgo is my Zodiac sign so maybe I should try and identify her. Tonight I can see the Big and Little Dipper as well as the Southern Cross, very special. We are at about 15 degrees north and I wondered if I could spot the Southern Cross, I am quite tickled. 

Just before sunset yesterday we had a visitor. We are pretty sure it was a large shark. Barry was on watch and he saw it about 4 times, I only saw it once ( I was below doing dishes) but he kept coming back and making lightning passes by the boat. He was about 1/3 of the size of the boat which would make him 4 meters, so a good sized animal. He had a distinctly white underbelly and a dark top, Barry saw a fin a number of time and I saw a very small fin when he executed a high speed turn right beside the boat. I think it was his dorsal fin the second one some sharks have by their tail. It was rather exciting, just when we thought there was nothing around.  It kind of gave me the creeps to think he may be stalking the boat in the middle of the night!!

Day 9

Things were going far too smoothly so yesterday we had a couple of "Oh S&%t" moments.  We had the Genoa poled out with our huge heavy Genoa pole, it is the only pole we have and Barry has always intensely disliked it. The topping lift broke and the pole was dragging  in the water, NOT GOOD! After a Chinese fire drill at sea which consisted of Barry trying to muscle the pole off the shrouds and yelling at me to hurry and tie lines up so we wouldn't loose the pole, Barry figured out we should put the boat in a heave to position, basically head to wind with the wheel tied off so the boat kind of sits in one position and lessen the stress on everything and everyone. Once that was done we could wrestle the pole aboard and get to work trying to repair it. About an hour later we were underway again but we had discovered our boom vang line had pulled the standing block off the deck so we could no longer use it. Barry said there was no way he could fix it but after a night to think about it he came up with a solution and we once more have full control  of the shape of our main. 

A gorgeous sunset last night . Today we had some rain showers for the first time and I was able to get a little of the dirt off the boat. The cockpit cushions which have been crusted with salt also got a fresh water rinse. After the showers we were treated to one of the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen.

The colours even continued into the water, I was sure we were going to sail right over the pot of gold. Barry's brother Bruce and his wife Margaret are in  the Barbados today on a cruise ship. We are just a little bit short, about 690 miles. I will wave at sunset when the ships usually leave. To be there on time we would have had to sail over Christmas and we really didn't want to do that. 

Have you heard of the Sargasso Sea? It is a big bunch of sargasso floating weeds somewhere in the Atlantic. I think we may have run into a part of it. At times there are bits of weed everywhere, then it is clear then we run into more, interesting.