Our day began just before 9am with a lovely aroma wafting into my cabin – our skipper, having said we could have a lye in today, was enticing us out of bed early by making us bacon sandwiches! Thanks for the bacon butties Rick! I quickly dressed then was a little disappointed as he had planned to serve it to us all in cabins (do you believe him?! I missed out on having breakfast in bed!
Breakfast completed, we set about on our studies – variation, deviation, computation and interpolation, which was great as we’ve been concentrating on procrastination for too long! We spent about 4 hours on our studies, feeling very proud of ourselves to realise we still had a long way to go to get through our exercises. Exhausted following our studying we each took to our cabins to recuperate!
We have made the right decision to sit tight in a haven, as we see the weather fronts passing quickly through. We set upon preparing tea, then I became a little distracted by a seal coming to the pontoon, she was not a bit shy and spent some time gazing across – delightful!
Seals are regular visitors to us!
Seals are common visitors to us, its lovely
I then tried to continue preparing dinner, then became distracted once more, this time by Rick who was teaching us how to input waypoints into the chart plotter of the Raymarine. Rick had a little trick up his sleeve and wanted to teach us another lesson! I shall explain.
John had meticulously worked out the lats and longs and inputed them into the chart plotter. His 1st waypoint led the boat nicely out of our marina – but right across land – which wasnt so bad really (ahem ahem) compared, that is, to the 2nd waypoint which was on land! He soon realised his error – and had made a tiny error and inputted incorrectly. Rick had a wry smile on his face and asked it to be rechecked. Mike now double checked his lats and longs and the waypoints were re-entered. A little better this time, but you really wouldn’t want to steer the course set out.
Well – now to Ricks lesson for the day. Don’t rely on equipment as there are human errors at play. We were however, still perplexed that we were not on the same position on the chart plotter as we were on the chart – to find that Rick had altered the computer settings for the plotter and set us as being in Bogota! Thanks Rick. Your new name is Head Wind Bogota! An important lesson however – not to rely on equipment and double check – for little fingers (and skippers fingers!) at play before you can make a big difference to the course to be steered. This was a safe bit of fun learning, but there have been many boats which have met their end with such errors, a sober thought!
Students at work!
Back to dinner – a joint of gammon cooked in coke, onions, carrots, leeks and lentils! The gammon then removed and finished off in the oven with a glaze of honey and mustard and served with potatoes, green beans and cauliflower cheese. The saucepan now has the contents left for lentil soup for our journey tomorrow! Thats planning and preparation we have learned so much about!
I’m sorry to tell you, we, yet again, contributed to the local economy and visited the pub in Lochinver. More characters met, this time from Germany and Austria! They said they struggle with the Scottish accent – we sympathized! Its now 11pm and the boys are all in their cabins asleep, as usual, and here I am writing the blog! I have, on numerous occasions offered them the opportunity to write it, and they politely decline – I wonder why! Goodnight!
