Crew Blog

The games we play

04 May 2008

Anyone who has been in a job, however exciting, for a certain amount of time will begin to attempt to liven it up by adding little games to the daily grind. It has been my suspicion for a couple of legs now that our
provisioners have their own games afoot, and there may also be side bets. Games I’ve spotted so far include:

- “Is It Meat?”, a family bout involving purchasing thousands of tins of green beans, removing the labels and marking them variously “ham”, “beef” and “chicken” before adding them to the day bags;

- “Napoletana”, an action-packed challenge in which pasta and tomato sauce is inserted into the weekly menu at increasing frequencies to see whether anyone notices;

- “Secret Stash”, in which day bags are altogether substituted for small caches of ingredients secreted around the boat. It’s a variation of Hide And Seek with the added thrill of potential starvation.

However this race we have spotted a new game. One so dastardly that it can scarcely be described on a family website, but we shall attempt to do so. The game is called “Desitin” and it is played as follows:

- Noting that we are running low on nappy rash cream (great for preventing yachtie bottie which is caused by sitting on a hard deck in wet shorts), find a brand in a US supermarket which comes, rather than in pots as is the norm, in tubes not dissimilar to those of toothpaste.

- Place the tubes in the single cupboard in the head, where nappy rash cream and toothpaste are both stored.

- Stand back (far enough to avoid splattering but not so far as to miss the fun) and wait for the hilarity to ensue.

I personally got as far as thinking “that’s new, you rarely hear a
toothpaste being described as ‘creamy and soothing’” before spotting the switch. Others have not been so lucky. While the roof of my fellow mother’s mouth has never been softer or smoother, his teeth are in a terrible state. And his breath isn’t great either.

Today, we are been mostly drifting down the Mexican coast off Acapulco.
Sailing would probably be an exaggeration - helming has involved pointing the boat in the direction the mild current is taking us in order to save face. Fortunately the current has been in roughly the direction we want to go, but the 6-hourly numbers haven’t been pretty. As night has fallen the wind has picked up slightly and we’re making 6 knots, but the GRIB weather files do not hold much promise for big winds ahead. We shall continue to trim trim trim, helm helm helm and push push push pins into the small model we have made of the boat immediately ahead of us - namely Qingdao, who have been singularly refusing to “come quietly” for at least a week now.