Crew Blog

Every day’s a school day

02 May 2008

‘A boxer left the ring after winning the world championship. His trainer took all the money and he never got a cent. Why not?’

Now, I don’t want you to think we’re sitting around in the sunshine doing nothing all day, it’s just that there are times in between sail changes when it’s possible to chat on deck. Granted the conversation is frequently punctuated with ‘trim’, ‘grind’ or ‘hold’, and the helm is often concentrating too much for full participation, but chatting is definitely possible.

We’re getting a bit intellectual on Jamaica at the moment. Lisa bought an IQ test book in Santa Cruz, with the idea of testing the crew’s IQ before and after each stopover. So far we’ve discovered at least one crew member is of ‘borderline’ intelligence. We moved on to lateral thinking problems this morning, like the one above. The question master is only allowed to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to any queries. We’ve a whole book of these to get through.

There’s been a reading frenzy going on too. The only sail trim book left that managed to escape the wet has been read by nearly everyone. Every time you come on deck there’ll be someone quoting from the (very small) section on spinnaker trim. The saloon has been renamed ‘the library’ and is generally full of people just reading. Obviously, being a racing machine, there are books on trim, weather and tactics, but just occasionally the odd novel or biography might just slip through the net.

Every day’s a school day on Jamaica. And the lessons don’t stop at night, you know. After dark ‘Stellarium’ gets pulled up on the computer. Introduced by Gus, it’s proving extremely popular. Once it’s set up for where you are in the world, it will show you the night sky in real time, with names of stars and constellations and even some cheesy artist’s interpretation of the constellations. It’s definitely our favourite new toy.

But anyway, as guessed correctly by the crew, ‘The boxer’ was a dog who had just won the championship at the dog show.