Crew Blog

Is there anybody out there?

07 March 2008

This is one of the questions we often ask ourselves at night, when visibility is poor, or if conversation is flagging. Sometimes, when sailing apparently into nothing, it seems that the answer must be no. On previous legs we have passed weeks seeing no human life beyond our bows. This race is different: a couple of military jets have screamed by at low altitude to say hello and we are almost jockeying for position mid-Pacific. Over half-way to Hawaii and we came so close to Uniquely Singapore that we could almost throw an apple and land it on her deck (it fell short). Invoking the starboard right-of-way rule against a competitor in the vast expanse of ocean was, well, unusual.

It’s been interesting over the last few days; constant breakages (above and below decks) have given us a maintenance schedule equal to any we have during the stopovers. The crew devotes enormous amounts of energy, and gives up sleeping time, to ensure that the work is done and situations recovered without any block on our progress. These yachts take huge amounts of punishment and are pushed to the limit 24 hours a day for weeks on end. There’s no respite. It’s not surprising that electronics and gear failures are a fact of life. We could do without the onboard fires though. And fingers crossed that the GPS stays up-and-running. On the large scale charts the Hawaiian archipelago looks very easy to miss and the sextant must be rusty (as well as the skills of those trained to use it). At times the amount of new breakages makes us think that we are in the middle of an absurdist play. At any moment we are expecting dancing zebras to leap out of the water and land in the cockpit. We’ll let you know if it happens.

Christian Lambie