Race 3 - Day 13
Crew Diary - Race 3 Day 13: Cape Town to Fremantle
13 November

Into The Southern Ocean, Or Knowing Things About Things

As you will already be aware, Team Dare to Lead is now enjoying the trials and tribulations of racing through the Southern Ocean... and what a load of trials there are!

But first I would like to tell you, dear reader, just how amazed I am at the amount of stuff that the members of the Dare to Lead crew know. They know things about all sorts of things.

As an example, we were sailing swiftly in 45 knots of wind last week and I was standing behind the helm position, admiring the marine bird life for which the Southern Ocean is famed. Amongst the avian throng there were some largish, dark birds skimming the wave-tops that I had personally earmarked as Sooty Terns. Wrong! My fellow Dare to Lead crew member informed me that they were, in fact, Storm Petrels. Oh, and by the way, the small white chaps over there were Manx Shearwaters. I was also reminded that the albatross we were watching was an immature adult, as evidenced by the brown and white mottled plumage. You see, people KNOW about things.

(Incidentally, using Wikipedia I discovered that the first person in history to cross the Southern Ocean was in fact St. Piran (the patron saint of Cornwall) in AD 875 on a small granite boat. This Wikifact may not actually be 100% correct – Ed).

Anyway, back to the plot onboard Team Dare to Lead in the Southern Ocean... the hardships we are enduring are manifold. Living at a constant angle of 45 degrees to the rest of reality for the last week or so on starboard tack means that people with upper berths on the starboard side have pulled their bunk frames as high as possible to compensate for boat heel. As a result, getting into bed at the end of a watch is akin to climbing the great north face of Everest. A pair of willing Sherpas or Dare to Lead colleagues are required to make the precipitous ascent in safety, and the risk still exists that a vital piece of bedtime reading, or an iPad or some other end-of-watch luxury, will have been left unnoticed at floor level (and which requires an additional Sherpa to retrieve – Ed).

Catering services in the galley of the Dark Horse Inn also inevitably suffer during periods of intense inclination of our Clipper 70 home such as we are currently encountering here in the Southern Ocean. The Mother Watch discovers that nothing will stay where it was put... sometimes, a complete bowl of food will leap across the galley into the laps of the unsuspecting off-watch. On other occasions, the bowl will stay in place, but the food it contains will leap independently. Serving and eating food becomes more like a scene from a slapstick movie. Despite the challenges, the standard of Mother Watch catering remains extremely high – although any cakes baked 'on the slope' will have a thick end and a thin end, and the two watches must choose their pieces carefully.

So, right now on Team Dare to Lead we are desperately hoping for the promised (and forecast) Westerly winds that will give us a swift and, above all, FLAT and level spinnaker reach towards Fremantle.

Mountaineering into bed can be fun at first, but enough is enough.