Day 5B – The analogy

There is a perfect analogy for last night.  It goes like this.  We are driving along in our Infiniti G35 on a nice open freeway, the cruise control is set on 80 mph (yeah we are speeding a little), life is good.  Night falls and unbeknownst to us the freeway ends and turns into a bumpy dirt road with potholes.  For whatever reason, we don’t turn off the cruise control, but just continue along, swerving and bumping our way through.  Daybreak comes and, you see our car didn’t have headlights, so we couldn’t assess the situation very clearly and with all the bumping it was all we could do to hang on, anyway with more light we are able to see just how bumpy this road really is, and to our surprise we find that while the cruise control is still on, the throttle has become stuck to the floorboard, wide open.  More aware of the full situation we manage to pry the throttle off of the floorboard (we put in a reef) and the car slows to a still rapid, but much more reasonable speed for the conditions.

Yep, it was just like that.  Shearwater was happy to keep flying along.  The crew, not so much.  We are sleeping a lot more and a lot harder as the constant motion just wears us out.  Sitting in one place is tiring as our muscles are constantly engaged over and over to counter the motion of boat and the waves.

Speaking of sleep.  Last night on my 12am-3am watch Chris was down below getting some much needed rest.  Suddenly, she leaps out of bed, scrambles up the companionway steps, flips up the canvas cover to the cockpit and looks directly at me.  From my perspective, I see a bleary eyed girl with matted hair from sleeping and two days without a shower, earplugs, one orange and one pink, sticking straight out from her ears, and she says, and I quote “Commy neah buddy!”  Uhhh?  Hi sweet pea.  Why don’t you go on back to bed now.  And just like that, she hops back in bed and is asleep again.  There can be some dull moments out here.  That wasn’t one of them.

Current position – 41 17.08n 15 00.45w
Distance to go – 286 nm
24 hour run – 187 nm

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