Race 1 - Day 6
Crew Diary - Race 1 Day 6
08 September

Homesickness is a new and rather odd feeling for me. Never till you leave something or someone behind do you miss them. I’ve lived away from home at Uni for the last year and never felt down yet a week into this adventure here I am having to take deep breaths from time to time. The realisation of how irrational this is set in when I found myself starting to miss things I’ve always hated… things like Milton Keynes…

Anyway, I’ve just finished making a couple of cakes in the galley with Dawn to take my mind off things. These are our first of the trip and whilst they’re not yet baked I can say the raw mix tastes GOLDEN.

With paragraphs like those last two, you might think all has been very calm on board Seattle in the last 24 hours. However the sailing last night really stepped up a notch. 44 knots of true wind and a top boat speed of 24 knots in almost pitch darkness brings an adrenaline rush like no other. Then there was my watch’s wake up call this morning: a sudden BOOM followed by skipper Ben screaming ALL HANDS ON DECK!! Our sleep deprived souls scrambled upstairs to find the Code 3 kite had thrown itself under our hull and shredded itself in the process. Oops. The good news is that with the entire crew on deck we managed to recover the kite over the stern in one piece but there’s a lot of work to be done to patch it back together. We’re still trying to find what caused the entire situation but at least no people were broken in the process.

So that’s life on a racing yacht. Moments of deep thought and cake making, permanently intertwined with others filled with terror induced adrenaline.

To my fam at home, I miss you so much and will call you as soon as I can :)