Thursday, May 11, 2023. Continues.
In the afternoon, Ken and I, both sitting in the cockpit, playing some backgammon, when a bird approaches. Coming in for a landing. Not uncommon at all, we quite often have hitchhikers sitting on the solar panels or the railing at the bow.
On any other boat I have been on, it’s just the way it is, and you clean up the bird poop after they leave. Tough shit to get rid of, but hey, give the birds a break.
Ken’s boat has Tikki the Sailor Cat, and Tikki, usually one of the most gentle of animals, does not take kindly to these uninvited hitchhikers. We fear she’ll fall off the boat when in hot pursuit, so we strongly discourage these birds from landing by shooing them away.
This time it is different, this time the bird lands in the cockpit and shows no fear for humans, just walks up to us. Tikki is asleep somewhere downstairs, and we immediately close the hatch so she can’t come up to the cockpit the moment she might sense the intruder.
It’s a racing pigeon. Rings around both legs. Number 73458 from the Canary Islands, born in 2021. Now what?
Healthy-looking bird, I hold a glass of water in front of it, and it drinks a bit, but not much. It takes off again, just to return moments later. Twice, take off, some circling around, and back to the boat. Makes me feel a little Noah-ish.
I know nothing about pigeon racing, but Ken assured me it is a big sport in Europe, and the top birds are worth their weight in gold. 73458, on the other hand, is not. It is lost.
73458 now sits in Tikki’s carrying case, on some paper towel with a little bowl of water and a little bowl of bread crumbs, in the forward stateroom, vacated by Maaike in Mindelo, with the door firmly closed. I guess we have to take it to the Azores.
Friday, May 12, 2023.
I’m on the three-to-six-night watch, and the winds are just playing with me. Two hours in, and already I can’t recall how many times I have let out a bit of genoa, taken in a bit of genoa, brought the whole genoa in and let out the staysail, and so on. Ken calls it the sailing life. He’s sound asleep below.
We still have use of about two-thirds of the main, a little less, can’t let more out on account it might get ripped to pieces when stress is asserted on the small existing rip, now safely wrapped inside the mast. We can, of course, safely take it in more, but there’s no need for that.
We’ll try not to touch the main until the Azores, where it probably has to be taken out of the mast for repairs. What an operation that is going to be. Ken explained how we need to do that, but right now, I can’t visualize getting that sail out of the mast. It looks pretty complex. The mending of the sail itself shouldn’t be that difficult. We’ll find a professional sailmaker for that.
And another solitary whale appeared on our starboard side at 9:45 in the morning. Much smaller than the one I saw yesterday, and this time Ken saw it too.
This whale actually circled around us, as opposed to just passing by. Ken thought it to be a pilot whale. It could well be. But even with the book, I couldn’t make a positive ID. By deductive reasoning, crossing off the list the ones I knew for sure it wasn’t, I also came to the conclusion that it likely was a pilot whale of some sort. A definite maybe. Still, an absolute pleasure seeing these unidentified swimming objects.
I went to lay down on my bunk at 6:30 this evening, trying to close my eyes for a couple of hours prior to the nine o’clock watch, when all of a sudden water started to drip on my head. Water in the cabin is never a good sign. I’m thinking, actually more hoping, that the culprit is a poorly secured porthole. We’ll work on that tomorrow. We did take on a lot of water on deck today, rather rough seas.
We crossed the 22-degree latitude today, meaning that Ken and Windsong have circumvented the world together. We’ll drink to that when we get to the Azores. And although a circumnavigation is more common these days than, let’s say, twenty years ago, it still puts Ken in a very elite group of people. Way to go!
Sunday, May 14, 2023.
Saturday and Sunday have been rather uneventful, as Sunday is coming to a close. No other whale sightings, but we did get another bird visit.
A truly exhausted migratory bird landed in the cockpit, slightly touching Ken’s head on its approach. We just let it be, and after a minute or so, it tried to take off, but seconds later, it came back and landed somewhere on the back of the boat, behind where we store the dinghy.
This boat has what is called a center cockpit. Most sailboats, particularly the smaller ones, have aft cockpits, where the end of the cockpit is the end of the boat.
On this boat, behind the cockpit, is the roof of the captain’s stateroom, what was called the poop deck on the old square riggers. Poop, from old French ‘pupe, from a variant of Latin puppis, ‘stern’. And not, as my mother-in-law believed until the day she died, the place where the captain on a tall ship did his number two business.
Because of the weather, we have been having twenty-knot winds with accompanying waves, it is ill-advised to go back there and start rooting underneath that dinghy for a small bird. It most likely, and unfortunately, has found an untimely death.
Tikki has not given any indication that something might be living underneath or behind the dinghy. Not necessarily a persuasive indicator, she also has not given any indication to know that we have a pigeon residing in her carrying case, now stored in the head as the forward stateroom was a little too bumpy for the improvised water dish.
The pigeon, now called Pedro, is doing well, eating lots of muesli and raw rice, hopefully not too bad of a diet. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that it will make it through the next eight days or so. Hopefully, we have hit the Azores by then.
Ken has been advised, through satellite texting, not to release the bird before seeing land. It is disoriented, has gone feral, and could fly in the wrong direction, away from land. We, of course, don’t want that to happen. We want it to hang out with fellow pigeons and have a long, happy life.