The latest instalment of Ben Lecricket, and a quiet life aboard Disco.
We are, for the first time in what feels like a while, out of sight of land. The Mexican coastline has drifted off over the horizon on the starboard quarter, and once again we are left with the now familiar view of 67ft of yacht ahead of us, with nothing but blue water around. The next bit of land we see will funnily enough be Mexico again, but it doesn’t change the experience of being out of sight of land. This is obviously just another day for Discoverer and her crew, but it’s a new experience for our favourite stowaway.
Ben Lecricket is smashing records left, right and centre. Not only is he now officially the most travelled Panamanian cricket the world has ever known, the world’s first offshore cricket, and the world’s most experienced sailing-cricket. Today we are probably setting a new standard in the furthest a cricket has ever been from land, to bolster and secure his previous records for a long time to come.
Ben is responding to his newfound fame and glory by being louder than ever. The afore mentioned music that keeps us going has now taken on a role in drowning out the racket Ben produces, and making those solo watches bearable. We like Ben, and are truly affectionate of him now, but two hours spent in a one way conversation with him is a bit much.
The wind is being true to form, and blowing from directly ahead of us. It’s uncanny how perfectly it comes from the reciprocal of where we want to go. We sail whenever possible, but these opportunities are fairly scarce at the moment. The Yankee, genoa and staysail go up and down, get trimmed, and are tried for a while, but this is normally short lived as we career off in a southwesterly direction. Won’t stop us trying though.
There’s a lot of reading going on, with Ty making another attempt at the book he started many months ago, and I’m using the time to chew on through some scintillating sailing and boat engineering theory. Various bits of deck and bosun work are being undertaken, however it’s hard to achieve lots on passage, as most work requires taking apart the very systems we rely on using every day. It is for this reason that the generator has been consigned to the ‘San Diego’ fix it list, as any further works involve removing the exhaust manifold, and as this is connected with the engine exhaust system, it would effectively put our engine out of action, which would definitively stop us in our tracks. No laptops and freezer is a small price to pay for keeping up the progress, so there’s no difficult decision to make there.
Onwards we go.
NAV STATION
Date: 18th March 2017
Time: 2205z
Position: 21-21.8N 107-49.7W
COG: 306T
SOG: 5.5kts
Wind: NW 4
Swell: NW 3-4ft
Sky: 0/8
Weather: Fair
With the support of our partner Weather Routing Inc.
