Aside from the blatantly obvious things like family and friends, these are the things over the last 6 months that I've missed the most (starting with the most):
- Pasteurised milk
- A Bath
- A big comfortable bed with a silent night's sleep
- A big comfortable sofa which you can sink into!
- Mother's home made apple crumble
- Lack of routine
- No daily orders!
Not long before this becomes reality! But, back to professional blogging, We've just left Madeira. Madeira was just not important. OK, so it was great to taste some incredible fortified wine, and I perhaps had a glass too much... though that ended up being a good thing, since there was a tattoo parlour looking increasingly beckoning outside... fortunately I just missed the opening times. Phew! When we parked up actually, we were completely dwarfed by this big cruise liner called "Panama", made by MSC Fantasia. It brought a brilliant comment from Nath who in response to my bewilderment at it's size, stated "Yeah we'd still take that out..." -yes, very true, we would. One missile. Well folks, look out for a Captain N. Sawtell in the next few years, I wouldn't go planning any cruises!
Madeira, from my pretty pathetic experience of it, is like a classy island where you can be completely English because everyone speaks English. Which, in my opinion, is highly irritating, especially after coming from Brazil where you have to learn a bit of Portuguese, which I far prefer (yeah, you heard that right- I'd ACTUALLY prefer to LEARN). But with people's mood at the moment, we couldn't care less. I pretended I was a wine connoseur for the afternoon, and contemplated buying a bottle of Madeira which was made in 1908. It only cost £950, which is er... nothing. To be honest though, all this stop is here for, is an excuse to have a meal, a few drinks and get some duty free while the ship refuelled in the port. The mood is simple. Get Home, don't die. We're now carrying out "OP HOUND" which is a very cleverly named operation derived from 2 words. See if you can guess what the 2 words are. Golly, this Royal Navy hierarchy really knows how to have a jolly old laugh! Actually they do appear to have gone mad. I mean, the DMEO is directing our weapons, and the Logistics officer is running the Operations room!?
Right well, that's Madeira completely unexplored... We're now trying to beat the weather by doing faster than we need to. It's doing my head in. At the end of the day, we're going to get sick crossing the bay of biscay whatever the weather's like. Everyone always does. Going fast is only going to make things worse... in our mess anyway, since we live on top of the props. Last night I did not have much sleep, but hopefully we'll be slowing down in the next 24 hours. Oh man. Theres like, wait a minute... 94 hours left?
+Handover.bmp)
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