We have been motoring for three full days now. This is due primarily to a lack of wind (although initially it was because the wind was on our nose). At one time on last night’s watch the apparent wind speed (AWS) was *zero*. The arrow on the AWS dial was spinning slowly, looking for guidance.

We continue to follow our six-hour night watches. I read that another couple tried this and stopped after two nights. I like it and Michael told me that he likes anything that makes me happy. What a good husband. I trained him well. JK!

For those who know me, I am an early to bed and late to rise kind of a person. It likely surprises you – as it did me! – that I like the 2:00-8:00 a.m. shift. I get to see both sunsets and sunrises. I can count the number of times I typically see a sunrise in a year on one hand. 👍😀

This passage has been completely uneventful, for which we are grateful. It is a nice change from the 1,500 mile passage from the Seychelles to Oman, during which lots of stuff broke.

We have just over a quarter of a tank of diesel in the port engine tank. We have just been running the port engine on this passage thus far since it has fewer hours on it. For reasons we don’t recall, there is only 3/4 of a tank of fuel for the starboard engine. We thought we’d filled it. In any event, we have enough fuel to motor all the way to Djibouti if we have to . . . but we hope to sail at least a little bit. Since the engines charge the batteries we haven’t run the generator at all.

We are not fishing because the freezer is full and we want to empty it as much as possible so we can defrost it in Djibouti. You may recall that it doesn’t work well. There is so much ice build up on it that it looks like a scene from an ice storm. 🙄

TTFN!
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We left Salalah, Oman at 11:20 a.m. local time yesterday. We have been motoring the entire time since the wind is on our nose. We dodged numerous fishing nets as we crossed the waters outside of Oman.

Yesterday’s ride was a serious rocking horse. Both the wind and the seas were coming towards us. Michael sat at the helm station and I stayed inside where it was more comfortable.

Our night watch schedule was this: Michael from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Cindy from 2:00 to 8:00 a.m. We are both happy with our shifts. I read a book on most of my watch which made it go by quickly.

We are sailing “dark” since we are somewhat close to Yemen. Our AIS is on silent mode, which means that we can see other boats on our Raymarine display (MFD) but they can’t see us. We also left the navigation lights off last night. Might be overly cautious, but that is okay with us. 👍

We are now about 39 nm from the entrance to the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC) in the Gulf of Aden. We will follow it for most of our time in the Gulf. We expect to be motoring most of it. Good thing we fixed the engines!

Nothing much else to report. We’ve eaten four of the six ice cream treats we bought. The freezer is so sad right now; the ice cream was just short of melting. 🤔 We have barely touched our snacks. We feel that it is important to keep you updated on our snacks. 😆

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Jason left yesterday. It felt weird at first. The three of us had been together 24/7 for almost 3.5 weeks and we had developed a little family. Michael and Jason had worked together to solve many problems. Bye bye, Jason! Safe travels! Have a rum and Coke for each of us.

So, it is just the two of us. Michael spent some time installing the new battery for the generator today. We are going to go with the two house batteries rather than three because we haven’t heard that our agent can find three batteries and we want to leave tomorrow.

Here are a few sites from the berth today. Two ships (I think both from Somalia – one for sure) docked behind us for a bit. One of them stayed for only a short time. There must have been some interesting smells emanating from it because the birds were highly interested. We know for a fact that the one nearer the dock is unloading goats and cattle today.

Seeing these animals coming off boats made me curious to know the main source of meat eaten in Oman. I asked one of the guys who has delivered diesel to us before and did again today. He told me that camels are the main source of meat. I didn’t even know that people ate camel meat. Of course, I Googled it. The countries with the highest levels of camel meat per capita consumption in 2018 (a bit old) were the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman (the last at 3,319 kg per 1000 persons).

We did a bit more provisioning today (many frozen ice cream treats!!) and had five more cans filled with diesel. Now we just need to wait for our agent to make arrangements to clear us out of here.

Many of our friends are not sailors so I thought you might be interested to know about the storage space for our clothes. This is where we keep our warm weather clothes – one drawer per person:

And this is the closet we use for warm weather clothes that we prefer not be wrinkled:

Those are in our cabin. We are using the forward starboard cabin to store our cooler weather clothes (again, one drawer per person) and our foulies (foul weather gear worn by sailors) and other outerwear:

If you visit us on our boat, please do not pack the contents of your walk-in closet. Hee hee.

Michael and I decided to be a bit lazy for dinner last night. We made a big ol’ salad and nothing else.

We hope to get underway before noon tomorrow. This will be our first passage with just two people. We’ll see how our night watch schedule works. . .

We started smelling a bad odor a couple hours ago. It was clearly coming from our boat because we didn’t smell it outside.

After flushing the heads a lot (even though they didn’t seem to smell), we thought the odor might possibly be coming from the sink in the galley. But it didn’t really stink either.

Several hours went by and Michael mentioned the smell again. I then realized that it smelled like sulfur. That led us to look at the house batteries. (We had been trying to figure out for some time why we had to run the generator so much to maintain a charge but hadn’t found the source of the problem.). Turns out one of the three house batteries had failed.

Our theory is that because the battery charger had been removed from the boat the voltage was drained down too much when the boat was in the Seychelles. It was just a matter of time.

We disconnected the battery cables from the battery terminals. We are now using just two house batteries. The voltage already looks better than it has.

We made it into the port! We were surprised to hear from our agent on Saturday, as it was the weekend. We were able to go to berth 26 in the port in mid-afternoon. We stayed on the boat the rest of the day as customs and the police didn’t board Seahike to obtain our documents until the evening. They were very nice.
We learned that we would not be able to go ashore but that the grocery vendor would pick us up from the boat and drive us to the store to buy groceries (and deliver to us those they don’t have in the port store). We were also able to fill our water tanks from a hydrant right by our boat. We also used the water to give Seahike’s exterior a needed bath.

In addition, another person took our jerry cans (the diesel from which we had emptied into our fuel tanks) and filled them for us.
You will be relieved to hear that I finally washed my hair and showered again. As did Michael and Jason.

So, we are sitting pretty. Well, we still need to find out if there is a laundromat. If not, we will hand wash some items.
We are currently waiting for Jason’s visa to be issued. Michael and I think we will be leaving for Djibouti on Thursday.

A few port stories:

1. We were all craving ice cream. We were delighted to purchase ice cream here. We might subsist on ice cream today. 😉
2. The berth is actually a spot by a wall. This is not surprising since this is 100 percent a commercial port. Berth 26 is the sole berth they offer to sailboats (typically sailboats in trouble).
3. All of the fees charged are based on the rates commercial ships are charged. For example, the cost to anchor is $130/day. Yep. You read that right. We were at anchor Monday-Saturday. We are paying a small fortune here. It is what it is. The berth is free. Ha! The price of groceries and diesel is quite reasonable.
4. Everyone we have dealt with at the port is *very* friendly.
5. Two boats down from ours turned out to be a boat from Somalia that was delivering goats to Oman. We are not exaggerating when we estimate that they unloaded 1000 goats. We wondered what the interior of that boat looked and smelled like – but we didn’t wonder enough to ask for a tour.
6. Men are supposed to wear a minimum of short sleeves and shorts. Women are supposed to wear baggy clothing, a minimum of short sleeves and pants or skirts that fall below the knee. While on the boat I continue to wear my shorts.  Having said all of this, we were talking to two (somewhat high up) port employees yesterday, and one of them said that Westerners dress in shorts. So I guess there is the rule and the practice.
7. There is some type of gull here that has the most adorable song. I hope to catch it on video so we can share it with you.
8. Finally, if you ever find yourself on a boat in Oman, be sure to check out with the harbormaster, customs, and the police. Just sayin’.