Crew Blog

Stuck

31 October 2007

You know you’re in trouble when the skipper starts poring through the race rules to see if it would be considered fair play to get the oars out and start rowing.

We’ve gone from peeling spinnakers one day to barely moving the next, having found ourselves in another wind hole. Yesterday the thrillseeker (as we like to call our lightweight ‘windseeker’ sail) was up and down. The wind would pick up, our hopes would raise, the windseeker would come down, and then so would the wind. So the whole process would start all over again. At one point we were overtaken by a sun-bathing turtle.

Overnight, the game was to make the boat move. Any direction would do. North was clearly not ideal, but it still felt better registering at least something on the speedometer. The speed record was 1.6 knots but sadly it was short lived. After you’ve spent half an hour coaxing at least some movement out of the boat, to find yourself with 0.0 knots again is a wee bit irritating - and generally time to handover the helm!

There must have been something in the water yesterday, as happy hour saw a spontaneous group dance to Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’. The entire crew were up on deck dancing in formation, led by the skipper. There was co-ordinated leaping about from one side of the boat to the other, and even a couple of spins round the spreaders. Look out Durban, here we come! (Eventually…)

There was talk of swimming today. Discussions as to whether we’d gain more speed by pulling or pushing the boat were swiftly abandoned when the sea snake was spotted just off the port quarter. There is potentially quite a lot of wildlife in the 3000-odd metres between us and the sea bed. There were rumours of a whale sighting yesterday, and we were joined by about a dozen dolphins at one stage.

It’s dark again now, so no more wildlife spotting for today. The GRIB files are promising us another painful night of light winds, but there should finally be some wind by tomorrow afternoon. And if not, we’ll just blame the skipper…

One love,

Claire