Dear Marge,

DATE: 2002-11-21
LOCATION:0094deg5N148deg05W
WEATHER: Hot, sticky, sultry

Thank you for your text messages. It has been too hot for me to do any typing. I meant to write back last night on my night shift, but I actually slept all through! Luckily the autopilot kept us safe. I feel hot, lethargic and tired.

I am afraid that I won't download your maps. It's a kind thought and it's nice to know someone has taken the effort but I have charts in front of me and can't afford the couple of pounds it will cost to download them. I have uploaded some photos. I don't know if you got them. I have been taking lots of pictures with the camera you bought me. I am very pleased with the results. They are slightly artistic. The skipper was chuffed too and took some pictures. I will upload them when we make it to Samoa in 2 weeks time. My other camera is seized up with salt spray. The laptop is cracked. It still works, but has suffered a blow. I had it packed in rolls of kitchen paper but the skipper moved them and we have been thrown about in rough seas again. Nothing is going to survive this trip. Your books are in a storage box but are damp with condensation, and a lot of my stuff is developing mildew. The satellite phone has been drenched with sea-water several times, and only luck has saved it being ruined.

The effects of two weeks at sea are now showing. We are down to tinned food. I cleaned up the stinking mess of eggs in the stores (no-one else was going to) and we threw away the stinking remains of the fresh stuff. In this tropical heat everyone and everything smells. We have used all our fresh water and have to use the water-maker. I don't like being reliant on that device, but at least we don't have to ration water (yet). The boat is suffering too. The rudder mount is letting in water - the bilge pump is keeping it down, but there is about 3 buckets-worth an hour coming into the engine room. The jib is now also wearing through and might rip soon. The boom and vang system is loose and as the skipper drives us hard into the wind the whole system is banging itself apart, making a deafening noise as it does so. I am trying to sleep beneath it, and the noise is so loud (metal striking metal) that it hurts my ears.

I tried Raleigh on the radio, thanks again for getting that info. I can't pick them up, we are possibly too far away. Instead I was receiving Morse on that frequency, possibly from an automated source such as a weather buoy. I decoded it, but there was too much noise and it looked like gobbly-gook. Either that or it was a secret code. I started some basic crypto-analysis on it and deduced that it was primarily noise, not a Russian code!

Yesterday had one real highlight. We had a shoal of dolphins with us for about half an hour, leaping through the waves and riding our bow waves. I don't know what species, not the typical bottle-nosed variety. They just slice through the water, keeping up with our ten knots effortlessly. However I couldn't get a picture, as they only break the surface fleetingly and you can't predict where or when. Fred has some video footage which I will upload at Samoa if I can.

The email idea is great, it's not totally secure, but I am not advertising my feelings across the Internet, where hicks from Alabama can phone their cousin boat-broker in California to tell them what a crap skipper they have hired.

I do enjoy receiving your texts, and ration my reading of them throughout the day. However I can only hold 30 at a time, so I have to keep deleting them, which is a real shame. At least email I can read and re-read.

Fred finally came clean. Bart caught him filling in an application to a postgraduate degree in film! So his whole scheme all along was to come on this trip purely to make a film to get him into grad-school. I knew it from the moment he held that camera. I still don't fully believe him. I don't even believe his name is Fred. He wouldn't tell us where he was born. Under pressure he said UAE. He won't eat pork but relishes eating beef. I asked him if it was religious or health reasons and he said health. But if he was really raised in a Muslim country... it just doesn't add up. I insulted him the other day when I asked how old he was. He said "guess", so I guessed 25. He claims to be 32! He looks and acts about 18 with a beard. He is under a lot of flak for general inconsideration of others. Phil refuses to cook for him now, since he served us tinned casserole for dinner, with nothing else, no potatoes or anything. Funny how tolerant we all are, really. He is reading White Teeth at the moment.

I wouldn't book your ticket to Sri Lanka just yet. I am planning to get off at Samoa or the next possible stop with an international airport. David is already doing the same thing. Can you investigate possible flights and costs? I need to get home from either Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Indonesia (Jakarta) or the next stop is Singapore. When I type that list, it really excites me. But I don't want to see the world this way. I feel so hot and exhausted that I don't really care if I end up in Bath by Christmas, and I am not going to give up on that PhD interview for anything. If I have to go home via America, I will.

When I get back I want to take you on a big night out in London, and be immersed in consumerist culture for a day. Then I want to go sailing in Wilfa, stopping in civilised mariners every night, in a boat that doesn't pitch and swing in the waves constantly.

I can't believe it is two weeks yesterday, and another two weeks to go until land fall! Then it is another two months of sailing! It feels like a life time...

Ben