Crew Blog

Not just cold - COLD

25 February 2008

On my last night in Qingdao, Fei Du, a Qingdao native and member of the Chinese Olympic sailing team, took me to a spa that had a large pool of therapeutic jets, capable of holding perhaps 100 swimmers. Surrounding this pool were perhaps six Jacuzzis for ten people each, filled with various types of tinted water. A label in both Chinese and English explained what therapeutic benefits were to be found in each. After perhaps an hour of enjoying the muscle relaxation pool, the stress relief pool, the energizing pool, and such, we decided we’d had enough hot water therapy and went out to dinner.

What was I thinking? I’ve spent the last 48 hours aching for the mere sight of any one of those pools, if not perhaps just a five minute dip. It has been COLD out here, colder than anything we felt before. And that’s without much wind. Imagine what it would be like if we were beating into 35 knots of apparent wind, as we were on the approach to Qingdao.

In fact, we’ve had so little wind that we dropped anchor last night, lest the tide take us back to Qingdao. This morning I came on deck at 6:00 a.m. to find Graham making a snowball. “Frost?” I asked. “No, it’s snowing!” He said. I looked all around and saw the first sprinkling of a white dust beginning to cover the headsails flaked on the bow. By the end of my watch, we had two inches of accumulation on deck and one more watch system in place; snow removal watch. Brushes, dustpans and gloved hands were employed with mixed results.

This evening, as I write this, the snow is gone, the deck relatively dry, and we’re under sail again with the lightweight spinnaker, duelling with Liverpool 08 one mile off our port beam. Now it’s merely cold but not COLD. 

Hawaii can’t come soon enough.