Day 29

1 October, 2003

Start of week five on board, the boat rockin’, shuckin’ and jivin’.. We’ve come right back around to mushrooms on toast for breakfast. I go up to the forecastle, and really have to walk like a sailor to get there. The heart rending screeches, moans, rattles, bangs and thumps coming from the flexing being applied by the ships motion to all the containers and their contents are spooky enough to scare Boris Karloff. I walk like a fast sailor!

Big twenty foot swells crash into our port side. On the forecastle it’s a good rollercoaster ride. Our northeasterly route, taking us as north as the US/Canada border means we kind of angle over the swells rolling down from that typhoon in the north. But it’s a big complex ocean and nothing like the gentleness of the Mediterranean or Red Sea. Of coarse there is the rule that says every seventh swell is the big one.

Only a few flying fish, but lots of skimming birds, and we still have some stowaway kind of swallows or something. I can’t imagine they are the same as came on board with me! A peregrine falcon has joined our lot!

I go out in a dark cold night, first quarter moon low behind a cloud in the western sky, to try and find the now rare BBC. A faint signal as I hold on to the railings so as not to be thrown or blown overboard. Alone in the middle of a dark Pacific. Nothing but sports, bah! Clocks go ahead an hour, again.

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