Hooray, it's someone's birthday!

According to the calendar it’s Friday today. And since we left on Tuesday, that makes this our fourth day at sea already. The days run into one another. You stand a four-hour watch at night and you spend all the hours around it sleeping, or trying to. So even if you come off watch at 8 in the morning, by the second morning at the latest you figure out that it’s smarter to go and get a bit more sleep.

After three nights everyone is getting well used to standing watch, and the crew is also getting the hang of the navigation and radar gear. Out on the open ocean every self-respecting ship has an AIS transmitter and receiver. We’ve set an alarm so we get a warning if a ship is going to pass within a mile of us in the next half hour. On top of that the radar is on standby so we can spot anything nearby that doesn’t have AIS.

Out here in the middle of the Atlantic that’s actually overkill: there are no small fishing boats around, and as a precaution we’re staying at least 100 miles off the African coast.

Today is KJ’s birthday, so when he went to bed at 8 this morning we decorated the boat with little flags and baked a bundt cake. Add a few small presents and the birthday is complete!

Oh, and in case you thought everything was perfect: sadly the watermaker has packed up again. On the first day we were going so fast that the inlet of the tank it’s been connected to since Lisbon stayed permanently above the water, and so the pump sucked the tank dry. But there was still some Wadden Sea mud at the bottom, and it can’t handle that. I’m already in touch with the manufacturer. Hopefully we can sort out some spare parts soon…