Changing laguages...

I thought I found the solution for my English friends and the friends of my English crewmembers by putting in this translation gadget.
However, when a friend of my actually tried it, he had a big laugh. The English translation it came up with wasn't too good at all. So I'll try to do it the other way around, write in English and use the gadget for those that need it to translate into Dutch. 

Anyway, today another book I ordered came in the mail. No book on sailing this time but on cooking J it’s called: North Atlantic Seafood by Allan Davidson.

Going on trips like we’re planning, sailing and boat handling is an important competency but not the only one.  You need to know stuff about diesel engines, electronics and the lot …

I don’t mind cooking and I quite often cook at home.  Of course we have a fishing rod on the boat.  Actually it’s Marc’s but he’s not using it so we can use it on the True Companion. We did some fishing on the Expresso when we sailed from Bermuda to Tortola. I long forgot the rod when all of a sudden the thing started to rattle like crazy. We had to slow down the boat to bring the fish in. It was a 1 meter wahoo.

It took a while for the beast to die. We ended up pouring some liquor in its gills.  I don’t know if that did the trick but eventually it looked save enough to get the hook out.  Now it was dead we had to get his guts and stuff out. Luckily Clare knew how to do this and, … had the guts to actually do it !

We didn’t know what kind of fish we had caught, I recall we then thought it was a dorade. Not that this would have made any difference, we had no clue on cooking a dorade or a wahoo. Never the less, Clare didn’t only cleaned the fish, she cooked it too and it tasted great J

Just surfing the other day, I found this forum of ‘vertrekkers’, people that plan to leave for a longer period. One of the items was on fishing and cooking so, with this experience in mind, I ordered the book they were discussing.

It’s a nice book and will definitely help us to determine the fish we might catch. It has a lot of recipes too. Unfortunately we won’t be carrying many of the ingredients for the recipes and the wahoo is not in the book L.

Anyway, some other books we have on board are the nautical almanac and the sight reduction tables. Those we will need to plot our position with the sextant.

Marc and I took a course on astronavigation last November. That was really fun! I had read some books on astronavigation. I came to a certain point but still had no clue on plotting a position on a chart. The same went for Marc.  After a week however, it took us less then 10 minutes take a sight and plot it correctly. It’s really easy once you know how to do it J

How to use a sextant in 5 steps

Of course it also helps to have a great teacher as we did, so thank you Alan Denham of  Cornish Cruising.

So we decided we’ll turn off the chart plotter for the ocean legs and go for the navigation by sextant. It’s fun and we’ll have plenty of time anyway. Next year, on our way back, we’ll make a stop over at Falmouth and do our Ocean Yachtmaster  J