Day 12 – Thursday 20 February.

By Cathleen Hughes.

The crew all had a great night of sleeping last night since they managed to get their bedding dry and some fresh air into the cabins. The lightning storms still linger on the horizon all around us. During a rain squall at approximately 09h00 Chris and Ashwyn took the opportunity for a fresh water shower. The grabbed their soap and lathered themselves up when all of a sudden the rain stopped. They were now stuck in the cockpit, covered from head to toe in foamy soap and no more rain to wash it off. They had to settle for a salt water shower off the back of the boat to rinse off but at least they now smelt fresh again.

In the morning, Virgil decided to go exploring underneath the fore peak bunks. As he opened up the port storage compartment, he was hit with the reek of sour milk. A few of the boxes of milk had received a few cuts and bruises from the boat being thrown around during the storm which allowed the milk to leak out and ferment for a couple days. If that wasn’t bad enough, the leaks in the fore peak which had created Renier’s personal bathtub, had found its way into the storage compartment too. Virgil spent the next half an hour filling a bucket with a combination of salt water and sour milk, carrying it through the saloon and tossing it overboard. Each time he carried the bucket through the saloon he left a wafting trail of stench that eventually became so potent you could almost see the green haze drifting around. It was so unbearable that the cabins were evacuated out of choice and left to air for the next few hours. Now that the sun was out again and the seas had calmed down, it wasn’t a problem and we decided it was time to start fishing again. So Rory set up the lines and let them out for the first time in 8 days.

While we were sitting outside enjoying the sunshine and chatting, their came a faint cry for help from the interior of the boat. Ashwyn went into the saloon to investigate and he found the door handle of the heads violently jerking but the door was not budging. We could hear a voice on the other side of the door being more and more frustrated us the door refused to open. Eventually Ashwyn gave a mighty heave, the door came free and Lorraine appeared, relieved that she was finally free from the heads.

Due to the software malfunction on the laptop yesterday, Chris decided to do a complete technical sweep of the laptop to ensure nothing more could go wrong with the laptop. You may have noticed throughout the return trip that Chris is either fixing the switch board, fiddling with the engine or tinkering with the laptop. Recently we have discovered that he calls himself “The Multi-tool” because he is always fixing and reinstalling things on board.

Within the scouting community there is a tale of a man named Luigi. Luigi is one of a long line of pizza makers that defy the normalities of pizza making to allow scouts to indulge in the Italian meal in all different settings. He is most well known in the Cederberg where scouts hike to the pizza base and make up their own pizzas which then cook in a handmade oven. The crew thought it a good idea to try their luck and so challenged Luigi to make one of his legendary pizzas in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. At first he was reluctant but after much convincing he eventually agreed to give it a go. He went through all the food stuffs on the boat searching for ingredients and toppings. Everything had to be made from scratch and the tools had to be sourced from all kinds of things. The dough was rolled out on the oven tray using a drinking cup as the roller. We had six pizzas made in total with two main toppings. One with sweet and sour chicken and the other with a salty Brazilian sausage almost like pepperoni and all were accompanied with onion, garlic, tomato paste, gherkin, mayonnaise and lots of cheese. The aroma of the pizza filled the cabins, flushed out any previous smells, and wafted from the companion way into the cockpit. The crew members who were snoozing, one by one began to rise from their beds to inspect the wonderful smells coming from the galley. Once one pizza was ready, it was cut into eight pieces and we all melted from the inside. The taste of the pizza was absolutely mouth-watering and made the crew members drool while they waited for the next pizza to emerge from the oven. A total of six hours later, all pizzas had been created and devoured and Luigi was very tired. He grabbed a snooze in the cockpit before heading off to bed to dream of his next big pizza challenge.

We are aware that our tracker isn’t working correctly so each blog will now contain our GPS co-ordinates and our heading until we can get the tracker working.

GPS: S29 degrees25.02 minutes / W025 degrees 30.61 minutes. HEADING: 154 degrees

Luigi

Pizza at sea