Pasta has become a bad word. I don’t want to eat pasta when I touch land for at least two months. Kristy has don’t a great job with the food but we have eaten pasta everyday for the last 14 days and my body just wants a big argentine/Chilean steak with two plates of fresh vegetables. I must be getting soft in my old age. It is normal for people to start talking about food on the 10^th day of a trip but normally I don’t end up with such an adversion to one particular food group.  I am ready to not drink out of a sports bottle and eat out of Tupperware everyday.

The last three days have been groundhog day. The same squally conditions but last night was a really doozy with massive wind shifts both direction and speed. It was pretty hard going. Not to the level if we had been racing but the big morale killer was looking at the Distance to go (DTG) which was actually more when I came off watch after 4 hours then it was when I started. And before you suggest it the route hadn’t been changed. We were heading it seems to the Ross Sea and Captain Scott’s cabin instead of to Chile. Two days before due to route changing at 5am we were 1200 miles to go and at 9pm that night we were 1200 miles to go. It would all be fine if we had plenty of fuel then we could motor south and set ourselves up for a reach into Puerto Montt. But we have 4 days of motoring left in the tank. The last section of 75 miles we will be motoring to get from the ocean through the canal to Puerto Montt so we need fuel for that section.

This boat is certainly not a race boat it goes upwind at about 50AWA so the tacking angles are like a square rigger. However, after sitting down this morning and looking at the numbers I am pretty certain that when the rig was put back in last year the instruments weren’t calibrated as we are 20 degrees off the wind on one tack and 130 degrees off on the other tack. Even taking into account waves that is just wrong. I still have to persuade Tim (the captain) of this. But it is pretty important if you are basing your tacking on shifts on TWD (true wind direction) and the TWD you are getting from the instruments is rubbish.

This morning the sky got light but there was not spectacular sunrise and it is just gray outside with the occasional mist of rain. However, there was a beautiful albatross swooping around but not for long and also a petrel.

Roll on Chile.