The Voyage: Saturday November 21

Position: 30°14'42.39"N 30°52'33.74"W

The clocks went back another hour. We are now on GMT-2.

After breakfast David and I went up to the bridge to visit Adrian. We asked him if anything exciting happened. 'Yes, we lost a container'. His cheeky smile told us he was lying. He knew we knew, and carried on playing: 'And now we're keeping an eye on the one in the front there, that'll be next.'
When Kjell came in we told him about the container, and he went for it.
Adrian enjoyed it so much he wanted to make it even better. He told Kjell that once they were in a very bad storm and the boat was going bow first down into a wave. They thought they might not come back up, so the helsman threw the boat astern (reverse) and they backed out of the wave and managed to sail on.
Sadly Adrian had now pushed his luck, because that was too outrageous to fall for. He had fun though.
The container-lie still stood though, so he tried to convince Kjell to stay on the bridge in case another one went. It was very flattering how far he would go to make us keep him company. Only we had work to do, so we couldn't stay all morning.

It was getting warmer and warmer and we decided to spend the morning catching up with personal stuff such as reading and writing.

After lunch we went through all the music we'd played and tried to write some of it down. We'll have to wait until March before this project goes into rehearsals, so it's important to have written guidelines to what we've been doing.

We are told the rolling will stay for two more days, until Monday. By now we all got used to it. For some of us it means no writing or reading, and for all of us it means moving through the boat is hard work, especially the stairs. We haven't quite mastered the skill of waiting for the right wave so the stairs become less steep, but we're getting there. We have mastered the skill of catching our cups or glasses as they glide around the table, and of always having one hand on standby for anything that might fall over.

In the evening we play games again.
The captain opened his shop earlier today and we all went to buy beers, cigarettes and chocolates.
Margit appeared with a bottle of gin and some cans of tonic. She also brought an ice tray. Alex asked her whether she used tap water or bottled water for the ice cubes. 'I used this', she said, pointing at the cans of tonic.
Very clever...