Day 198, Year 9: Questions Four Year Olds Ask
Date: Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Weather: Beautiful Day, Temp in the 60’s F
Location: At Home with the Goldstones in East Falmouth, Massachusetts
Today was a typical work a day. Mark worked from 10 to 6 at West Marine and then had an hour and a half monthly meeting. Loooooong day for him. Heather doesn’t normally work on Wednesdays, but since she stayed home with Ollie so we could go to Boston yesterday, she worked half a day today. And while Mark and Heather worked, Jonah and Ollie and I had fun in the backyard. When Heather came home, Ollie was napping and she took Jonah food shopping with her. When they returned, Jonah presented me with a red rose and told me it was to go back to Windbird with me. I then told him how in Thailand, when you launch a boat, you decorate it with flowers, sort of like christening a new boat. So I said the rose would be Windbird’s christening flower. Jonah looked at me and asked, “Who’s Chris?” That was definitely the highlight of my day!
Our friends Geoff and Chris who are crewing aboard Lady M as she crosses the Atlantic wrote an update today. They made it to the Azores and filled the almost empty fuel tanks with 70,000 litres of fuel. That’s about 18,500 gallons. Sure am glad I didn’t have to pay that fuel bill. Here’s the update from Chris after I wrote to her yesterday telling her about Windbird’s 24-hour turn around.
“Windbird’s work period is quite the opposite to what we have experienced over the past 6 weeks and the problems continue to plague this gorgeous sports yacht. We arrived in the Azores about 7pm on Tuesday evening by the fumes in her fuel tanks. She had guzzled over 70,000 litres of fuel and we crawled in at a relatively slow speed for her of 13 knots. The fuel pipe was waiting on the dock and they pumped 75,000 litres in around an hour and a half and after taking on hundreds of bags of groceries, we were on our way in perfectly calm conditions doing 24 knots. Just after I started my watch at 2am a hydraulic hose in the starboard steering blew and sprayed oil all over the place including Geoff who was on watch at the time. Between him and the Chief Engineer they managed to fix the problem with another hose from the SCUBA compressor. It took a few hours but eventually we were underway again and at the moment we are flying along at 24 knots in the most gorgeous conditions for a motor yacht you could want and burning over a 1,000 litres of fuel per hour!!
We are heading non-stop to Malaga in Spain now instead of stopping in Gibraltar. It’s just been a continuous chasing of unrealistic arrival times to try and keep the boss happy. Stupid really as everyone is feeling so stressed and now working around the clock to have her ready for the owners to step onto the moment we arrive in port.”
