Race 4 - Day 11
Crew Diary - Race 4 Day 11: Fremantle to Sydney
13 December

We just gybed, we are getting very close to the 45° lower limit so we had to gybe but the sea state was to bouncy to gybe with the code three up. So we dropped the spinnaker, gybed and hoisted the Yankee one. It was 1300 @ 44°48.34 South 139°10.87 East, 25 knots of wind going down wind, heading towards Tasmania. We were happy we dropped the code three because 30 minutes after our gybe the wind increased to 30+ knots - too much for the spinnakers. I was standing as check helm with Dan on the helm cruising down the waves with up to 16 knots of boat speed thinking and talking about the last 5 months and how taking part in the Clipper Race amazed us in loads of different ways. I am now at the earlier mentioned coordinates with 23 people on a boat at a location where probably no one has ever been before. I ended up here because my old job decided to make me redundant last December and I decided to do the Clipper Race, the adventure I heard about many years ago and was thinking, maybe one day I may do this. During my trip I've discovered some amazing links and connections.

Shona has Dutch friends in the Netherlands, they amazingly live in the same town I live in. When she visits them she sometimes goes for a run around a small lake. My parents house is situated on that lake, so without knowing she has been as close to me as a few hundred meters! And now we are together on a 70 foot yacht racing around the world. Shona's parents live really close to Dale's parents in South Africa. On Leg 3 Dale told us a story about an angry man in The Castle (pub close to Clipper training location) swinging his prosthetic arm with a real captain hook on it strangely enough I was there the same night during my level 2 Clipper training both of us not knowing he will turn out to be our replacement skipper for the race.

Marion was very good friends with Luke's parents when her son and Luke were born. Before she left for leg 4 she sent them a Christmas card telling them she was going on the clipper race on Dare To Lead for this leg, not knowing that their son is doing the same leg on the same boat on the race! And so they meet again after many years on this adventure.

A few days later, stuck in a wind hole we got tasked with packing the Spinnaker away after the other watch dropped it just before the watch change. We were absolutely not in a hurry and it took us two and a half hours to do it with some important meetings, discussions, a couple of brakes and the constant interruption of doing the log entry on the hour. At some point we decided to hand the job over to other people in our watch but I found a flaw in that plan: if we hand it over to the wrong person it might turn out completely different to what we expected. We feared the next time we opened the sail locker door, the code three would be origami folded in a giant swan who pops his head out the door together with the orange storm sails folded into her ducklings and the moment we open the deck hatch the windseeker would be folded in a giant origami giraffe who pops his head out like a jack in a box. At that point I was really happy I had gone to the heads before as we all fell about laughing and I almost wet my pants with the tears in my eyes.

Brought to you by the Dutchman on Dare To Lead. out