Off Portugal

I had a wash and shave this morning and some clean clothes. Feeling like a new man.

I seem to be right in a shipping lane, as far as I can tell there are no traffic separation schemes around here, my Garmin chartplotter doesnt have europe and my navionics dont have large scale down loaded charts for here, there is the one off Finisterre which does show so I assume that the trail of ships are just in between that Traffic separation scheme and their next waypoint off Lisbon where there doesn’t seem to be a TSS.

As I went down to get some pork pie salad for lunch yesterday the wind went all light and veered to the Northwest, too light to do much with and as we still had 2 to 3 m of sea and swell it meant we were rolling and pitching all over the place with the sails and boom banging and slatting. We were still making about 2 knots to the South although if felt like we were stopped. Once I’d put a preventer on the boom to stop it swinging about with the roll and rolled up the genoa I had little else to try. As I was running out of curses I needed to do something to take my mind off the rolling and jerky motion so re tackled the sea water pump. It is a new one this season that went in over the winter, both the inlet and outlet had been leaking, I had previously put a new jubilee clip on the outlet thinking that I had fixed it however it turned out that the inlet was also leaking. To get to the leak meant removing the pump. I became quite good at this seeing as I ended up doing it 5 times before stopping the leaks. The inlet has one of those guaranteed, fire, bomb, atomic explosion proof rubber hoses with a wire coil inside it, it had had extra thin jubilee clips on it, presumably to entice it to shrink enough to make a seal, one of these was knackered and there was a split in the pipe. Having tried several times without success with new jubilee clips I ended up having to wind a lot of ptfe tape around the internal fitting to make the hose tail bigger and encourage a seal. Of course upon re assembly the outlet now leaked and needed the same treatment. Eventually, by Archers time in the evening, it was all fine and I then motored for a few hours until the wind picked up at about 0300 this morning. I’m not sure if this is an approved modification….(Prop?) it’ll have to do until we get to the Canaries in any case where I’ll invest in some new pipe and jubilee clips. Unfortunately I didnt bring a hot air gun which might have helped, at least on the outlet, as that’s a plastic suction pipe. I, stupidly, didn’t buy a battery operated hot air gun in Lidl a few months ago when I saw them, I thought later it would be handy on the boat and decided I’d buy one next time they came up as these things seem to come and go in Lidls, however I have yet t see one again.

Bangers and mash last night with some lovely broccoli with lashings of butter.

The wind is SWly again today and all my forecasts indicate I should head South East to pick up following winds off Portugal, the Portuguese trades? so I’m doing that and hoping for the best with Orca interactions.