Race 6 - Day 21
Crew Diary - Numbers so far…
12 February

As we are getting closer to arrive in Subic Bay, Philippines it’s time to do a quick review on Race 6 numbers for CV22. The below numbers are considering that the race will last 27 days:

1. 27 days and nights. 27 amazing sunrises and sunsets. 27 nights with hundreds of magnificent shooting stars. Countless nights with lightning and 2 days including thunderstorms. 11 days with sporadic squalls, with dozens of hair wash on deck. 1 full moon cycle.
2. 27 Days, 135 watches, 648 hours, 39K minutes, 2.3M seconds.
3. 1 Skipper, 1 AQP and 16 crew members. 11 women and 7 men. 9 nationalities, 5 people with dual nationalities, 8 crew members with kids, with a total of 21 kids.
4. 5 key holidays during the race: Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam day, Chinese New Year and Valentine’s day.
5. 1 crew member birthday (Jane Lever).
6. 4,297 nautical miles (nm) sailed, 134 nm to destination (Subic Bay, Philippines).
7. 268 nm was the maximum number of nm sailed in 24h. Unfortunately, the slowest day is likely yet to come…
8. 7 x 30-45 degree angle days.
9. 0 serious injuries. A few small injuries among several crew members. 1 crew member suffering from wisdom tooth pain. 2 crew members falling inside the lazarette. 1 crew member falling against the wet locker bar. 2 crew members whipped on the legs with the lazy sheet.
10. 1 “I’m going to die moment” according to fellow crew member and bunk buddy Bernine.
11. 156K total “heads” pumping, 8.6K per crew member. Not sure if you are aware, but each visit to the “heads” has a required minimum number of 40 pumps (20 in and 20 out). Some people would argue that not always the required minimum of 40 pumps are done, however I can guarantee you that many times, we need to pump a lot more, up to 100 times, therefore 40 seems to be a fair estimate per “heads” visit. I have estimated that per day each crew member visits the “heads” 8 times.
12. 135 bilges checked/pumped and 135 boat and heads cleaning. 25 crew blogs written. 81 meals prepared per the mothers on duty, 44 loaves of bread cooked. 648 log entries (1 every hour), since each log required 38 columns to be filled, 24.6k individual log entries.
13. 2 sharks spotted (1 at less than 2 meters from the boat), 4 whales, dozens of dolphins swimming along the boat during the day/night, 1 tuna fish, many jellyfish (mainly while leaving Airlie Beach), countless flying fish, countless plankton and squid (at night).
14. 1 bird which landed and spent the night on top of the mast. We named him Bryan.
15. 1 Flying Fish Attack where we had dozens of flying fish landing on deck, hitting crew members on various body parts, including this blogger in the face and neck.
16. Hundreds of very loud crew member screams during Flying Fish Attack (an average of 20 screams for each flying fish that landed on deck).
17. 1 abandoned Life Raft spotted.
18. More than we would have liked to see rubbish floating on the water.
19. 6-7 hours slept per day by each crew member.
20. 135 times each crew member had to put on and remove their bed sheets before bed.
21. 1 Equator crossing, 1 Christmas cake offered to King Neptune who after a thorough judgement granted the Shellback title to 11 Pollywogs.
22. 9 days on the same tack with no evolutions other than trimming.
23. 3.120 litres of water filtered by the water maker, 6.42 litres per day/person. The filtered water was only used for cooking, coffees/teas, drinking and brushing teeth. ~25K (or 924 per day) foot pumps for the freshwater.
24. 14 head torches, sunglasses and water bottles “lost” (and found) per day because they were misplaced.
25. On average each crew member had 4 devices that needed to be charged - (mobile phone, battery pack, fan, other devices (watch, camera, headphones, iPad, Kindle…), therefore a total of 64. We only had 3 USB charging points (albeit that for ~4 hours everyday we had the generator on which provided some additional charging points).
26. 14 days sailing without knowing what the race destination port/country would be.
27. 25 fans on board.
28. 1 clipper boat (Dare To Lead) seen after crossing the Equator.
29. 2 Items lost at sea by crew members - 1 hat and 1 croc shoe. The croc shoe was mine - I now have a left foot black croc size 11 to sell, please let me know if you are interested in buying it.
30. 68 jokes by Dave, 50% of them no one other than Dave understood the meaning … I'm probably underestimating the number of jokes, and overestimating the percentage of jokes that the crew got…

Please note that these are my estimated numbers, and occasionally might be incorrect. As you can see by the above, I miss using excel.

After the last ~10 days of good wind, we are now almost at a standstill situation, with very little progress in the last 24 hours. It’s not only us, as you can probably see on the race tracker the whole fleet has slowed down. Our current ETA of arrival in Subic Bay is Saturday Feb 15th by midday (that would mean that the race lasted 27 days), however if we keep the current boat speed, we will only arrive by Wednesday Feb 19th… we are hoping that King Neptune remembers the Christmas Cake we offered him when we crossed the Equator line back on Jan 31st and brings us back some strong winds/currents. We have been trying everything to get the boat moving faster, with very little success. We have spent most of the day/night doing “scalloping”, where every couple of minutes we “come up” to the wind try to gain some speed and fill up the kite and then “bear away” very slowly to go back to our ideal course, trying to maintain the speed without deflating the kite. We are currently at eight place, but we hope we can still finish in a better position. Obviously, everyone can’t wait to cross the finish line and satisfy some of their cravings that I talked about on my previous blog.

Today was marked not only by the very light winds but also for seeing another Clipper boat, lots of small fishing boats, canoe style, with only one person on board and of also by the fact that we finally saw Philippines land. One of these fisherman boats (slightly bigger) with 4 fishermen approached our boat to try to sell us fish. They showed us what seemed to be a very long eel. After the doldrums (for two weeks) we had not seen any other Clipper boat, since yesterday we have been sailing, neck to neck with CV27 - Dare To Lead. There’s a lot at stake with this race within the race, since Adele and Lyndsay have their other halves on that boat, we must finish ahead of them!

I would like to leave a Big Thank You note to Colleen for the Valentine’s Day package, the entire crew loved it!

Cheers,

PS: Message from Alec - Thanks Rob for the fantastic fan