The highlights for day four while sailing the Atlantic were visiting dolphins, doing 190 miles in 24 hours, and having a shower. Find out what wasn’t so great for the day.
Sailing The Atlantic Day 4 – Taking A Shower
Around midday, all of our bowls slid out of a cupboard and smashed to little pieces – thankfully we had plastic bowls as a backup. I had regrets for not securing things in cupboards better – everything was clunking and banging. And the time and effort to clean up the smashed bowls was crazy. Heck, I’m still finding bits of porcelain around.
In the previous 24 hours sailing the Atlantic, we did 190 miles making it our best 24 hours yet.
Every day, throughout the whole trip, we bet on the distance traveled in 24 hours – By day four, Eve was in the lead. Aside from discussing our distance, we also played our first match of Rummikub, a game that’s similar to Rummy. If you’re planning on doing long passages this is the game we recommend the most. It’s a tiles game and won’t fly away in the wind.
For lunch, we had ham and cheese toasties and for dinner, chicken jambalaya (a meal I made and froze before we left). The Jambalaya was rated the best dinner yet but there wasn’t enough for seconds.
For the first several day’s none of us made quite enough food.
We were all accustomed to cooking for two people rather than seven. Eventually, we started making enough rice or pasta to bulk out the meals. The above picture shows baguettes with egg and bacon – after each of us had one we could have eaten two more at least!
Remember: you could be reading this article in book form (paperback or Kindle). Our Atlantic crossing is in my book ‘Changing Lifestyles – Trading in the Rat Race for a sail around the world!‘ The book is almost 400 pages long and details our life on land before we sold up and sailed away, our transition from living on land to living at sea, our voyage around the Mediterranean, Atlantic Crossing and our sail up the Caribbean. It’s a great book for anyone that has ever dreamed of sailing around the world.
Sienna, Simon and I had our first shower and it felt great – feeling clean is such an amazing sensation!
Standing in the shower while sailing the Atlantic and moving side to side was such a difficult feat! I had all the soap bottles sliding around my feet while I wedged myself into the most comfortable corner. I couldn’t help but think, can’t I get five minutes of stability!?
We also watched BBC Blue Planet Part one – I thought it would be educational for all of us to learn about the seas while sailing across one of them – especially for Sienna’s benefit. Previous to the trip I downloaded the whole series. Unfortunately, we only made it halfway through the second part. I think Sienna was so immersed in sea life that she didn’t have the tolerance to learn about coastal erosion, global warming or anything too heavy. She was more interested in playing, watching kid’s movies or eating.
Later on, Eve and Sienna watched Brave while the boys spent time in the cockpit talking.
I wrote in my journal:
“I feel like I can’t stop eating. All-day long I’ve been munching on stuff. I manage a tiny bit of homeschooling for Sienna today – I will work hard tomorrow to get through a whole lesson. So far everything has been fine – been going with the flow and the whole day seems to progress without me forcing anything. I thought I would be bored but I haven’t been once yet. My night watch was uneventful. Not one ship or boat we did sea. Simon put up the American flag in honor of thanksgiving (tomorrow). I had one hour with Simon and two with Kenny. Kenny immediately noticed the flag. With Simon, I read my book and with Kenny, we chatted about religion, Atheists and our thoughts on his the world works. We also discussed our Thanksgiving Day plans.”
What’s Next in our Sailing The Atlantic by boat series?
- In the next article, day 5 we celebrated American Thanksgiving Day. We had a long discussion about how we needed to handing night watches as we crossed time zones. It was something that I hadn’t even thought about! And we finally caught our first fish. It was a beautiful Mahi-Mahi. Check it out here. Transatlantic Sailing.
- The previous article is all about day 3. Find out what we used for communications with ARC to get weather and fleet updates. And contrary to what I thought, the weather was not our main point for discussion. The fleet position report was. Find out why: Crossing The Atlantic By Boat.
- Click here for a general overview of our Atlantic Crossing