Crew Blog

Our usual position

28 February 2008

We appear to be back in our more usual position in the fleet. Being in the lead for so long wasn’t really our style, so we thought we’d take this leg at a far more Jamaican pace.

Well that and the fact that it took us two hours to sail off our anchor outside of Qingdao. Our anchor rope had become wrapped round the keel and we had to sail around in circles to try and untangle it. We’d cleared the decks of most of the snow by then, but still had enough to have a snowball fight with Nova Scotia later that morning.

And then, of course, there was the customary spinnaker wrap. The kites don’t just collapse round the forestay, they carry on twisting and twining, weaving their way in and out of the halyards and the forestay until they become almost a permanent fixture. It took more than twelve hours and about half a dozen trips up the mast to free this one. By the time we really got sailing properly again, we were way behind the rest of the fleet.

Frustrating. Particularly as we thought we’d finally left our bad luck behind us, and had been sailing well. But, as everyone who’s been following this race will know, there’s a long way to go and anything could happen!

So, new experiences so far: 1) having to anchor within sight of the port we’d just left to stop us drifting backwards. 2) Waking up to two inches of snow on the decks of the yacht – enough to build a rasta-snowman. 3) Sailing with snow falling and hot water bottles shoved under our jackets. 4) Retrieving one such hot water bottle from the left leg of my salopettes, as it migrated it’s way there during a sail change…

We have a great crew on this leg– as usual on Jamaica Clipper. They’ve been put through their paces tacking and gybing our way through fishing fleets, and dealing with all sorts of sail plans, and done fantastically. We’re looking forward to leaving the busy coast behind and to introducing the new crew to some proper ocean sailing. Oh to be free of these fishing fleets!