Crew Blog

A frustrating few days

13 January 2008

Sunday 13th January

After a frustrating few days when we had very light winds whilst most of the
other boats had much stronger winds and were able to quickly overhaul us, we
are finally making reasonable progress tacking upwind. As we are sailing
upwind, we have a fairly strong breeze on deck which is keeping us cooler
than in the last few days. The downside of sailing upwind is the heeling
angle, which means that we are staggering around below, swinging from
handhold to handhold - this is fine for the taller crewmembers, but those of
us of a vertically challenged nature must make leaps of faith to span the
gaps between the handholds.

Whilst we were making the best of the light winds in the last few days, we
were not without entertainment. A large amount of debris in the water kept
us on our toes, particularly as some of it consisted of quite large logs,
but we seem to have survived unscathed. A highlight was an entire floating
island, about the size of a large rowing boat, complete with palm trees -
presumably it broke free of the coast and floated off to sunnier shores. It
certainly created a fair degree of puzzlement as we struggled to identify
what kind of ship was approaching us. We did contemplate claiming it and
planting a flag (of which we have a large assortment on board) but we didn’t
want to start an international incident. We also had a series of rain
showers - this may not sound particularly entertaining for those readers
back in the UK, but after a couple of weeks of extremely hot weather and
limited water, there was a general rush for the shower gel.

As I am sitting here in the nav station writing this blog, it has been
pointed out to me that on the instrument panel there is a light marked
“refrigerator” and it is alight, indicating that it is on. It is news to me
that we have a fridge - if I’d known, the chocolate mousse of a few days ago
might have turned out much better, not to mention the fact that we could
have been indulging in cold drinks and ice cream over the last two weeks,
rather than warm water. It is obviously a well-kept secret which we need to
get to the bottom of. Watch this space.

Claire