Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Skull Creek: pipe berthed; water; Yellowbrick; waiting



        Last night was my first back sleeping on a pipe berth, specifically the port one.
        In many way being on a pipe berth is more convenient, though a couple of drops of condensation that formed on the overhead fell on me.  The pipe berths are comfortable, but they require somewhat different sleeping positions than the relatively more spacious v-berth.  I might be the only one ever to use ‘spacious’ about a Moore 24.
        I biked to the Harris Teeter supermarket where I bought a few things, including a 12 pack of Heineken for the passage, one of which nicely chilled from the bike journey back to the condo went well with half a roast beef sandwich.  I’ll eat the other half for lunch tomorrow.  As noted here earlier, GANNET almost has refrigeration these days.
        Mentioning the beer brings to mind a question Chris emailed me about how much water I carry.
        Thinking it might be of general interest here is my reply:

My Jerry cans are standard 5 gallon US which is 18.92 liters.  I don’t fill them quite to the top.  There is a spigot I can move from can to can that makes transferring water to my one quart/liter drinking bottle and my half gallon/1.89 liter daily water bottle.  I have found repeatedly on the GANNET voyage that my consumption of fresh water is .37 gallon/day or 1.4 liters a day.  I also get liquid from juice in the morning and a can of beer in the afternoon, and whatever spirit or wine I have at sunset.  I also take some bottles of neutral liquid to drink.  Club soda, etc.  Here in the US I take a mixture of tea and lemonade made by a company called Arizona.

For the 6,000 mile passage from Darwin to Durban, I bought extra bottled water at the supermarket and had close to 35 US gallons on board when I sailed.  Far too much weight, but I have almost died of thirst twice and it is horrible.  I don’t recall how much water I had left when I reached Durban.

        Fortunately I went to the Yellowbrick site yesterday evening to create a new default event for 2019.  In doing so I realized that I had not renewed my line rental with Yellowbrick which was about to expire.
        To use a Yellowbrick requires in addition to the Yellowbrick itself that you have a line rental, which costs £10 a month and can be turned off and on monthly, and credits which cost £80 for 1000—I generally use 600-700 a year.
        Having paid for another year of service, I turned on the Yellowbrick, sent up a position to be certain all is working properly, then deactivated the unit to save the battery.

        I just downloaded a GRIB which if it can be believed indicates that I will probably not depart until a week from today at the earliest.