Race 3 - Day 13
Crew Diary - Race 3 Day 13: Cape Town to Fremantle
13 November
Day In The Life Of A CV26 Visit Seattle Mother
This is very typical account of what a Mother does during a watch on any of the Clipper Race boats.
20:00 the day before – I find the food bag with Day 13 on it. I check the menu for the following day and check the contents of the day bag. I am cooking on Sunday, so traditional eggs and bacon (yes, we still have them on Day 13!) for breakfast; rice salad for lunch and pasta bolognese for dinner (lentils instead of meat – no, we don’t have huge freezers on the boat). I also need to bake two breads (I think we would be a bakery if we were not a sailing boat) and two cakes for the following night snack. I am missing pasta for dinner and let Emily, our awesome victualler, know. I also confirm with her the rations and the meal plan for the day. Then I go to sleep.
22:47 - I wake up thinking it’s time for my watch and the bread making. I start dressing up when I realize I am the only one doing it. I find my phone and check the time. Oh no, it’s happening again – I am getting up too early for my watch. I go back to sleep.
23:30 - I got woken up properly for my watch. I snooze for few minutes as I don’t have to put 6 layers of clothing including foulies like everyone else. I am a cook and get the luxury of 10 minutes snooze.
23:40 - I get up and dress up. I make my way into the companion way on time for the headcount, shout my number into the darkness, turn around and I am in my kingdom for the day, the galley. I have a quick chat with the off watch – my cooking partner is sick, and we decide that various people will be helping me out during the day. We are in a wind hole, so the boat is nice and flat. Much better day for cooking than when I did it first nine days ago at a 30 degree angle.
00:00 - I fetch bread mixes from the food bag. I need to bake two loaves tonight: farmhouse and onion bread. I follow our boat’s proven method of kneading the bread on the flour-covered counter then proving it for at least 30 minutes then kneading it again before putting it in the oven. It’s still cold outside and not much warmer inside. I heat the oven a bit and let the dough rise in a slightly warm oven.
01:15 - I put the first loaf in the oven. The second one is slow to rise, so I am giving it a bit of extra time. The boat heels over suddenly and speeds up. Someone on deck asks to wake Nikki, our skipper, up. I hear Nikki is already up and getting ready to get up on the deck. I hear the crew is getting ready to drop the spinnaker just in case. Before Nikki gets there, the gust is gone and a steady wind continues to power the boat. We are out of the wind hole and sailing towards Fremantle again.
02:00 - I check on the onion loaf in the oven. It looks nice on the outside, but when I try to take it out of the pan to cool it off, I run into raw dough at the bottom. I stick it back in the oven for extra time. We keep thinking 40 minutes is enough and we keep putting it for a longer time every day. It must be the boat oven or cooler temps outside.
02:30 - First loaf finally done. Farmhouse bread has risen nicely in the meantime. I make four slices on the top of the bread (trick we learned from Tomasz, our dear Polish friend, on Leg 1) and set the timer for 40 minutes. I then fetch the bacon from the freezer and start defrosting it for breakfast.
04:00 - Off to bed. I set the alarm for 06:00 to give myself enough time to cook breakfast.
06:00 - Alarm goes off. I hit the snooze for 10 minutes.
06:05 - I start feeling guilty for snoozing and get up.
06:10 - Iain, my temp helper for breakfast, comes around to wake me up. I get 5-second satisfaction for being up and not making him feeling guilty for having to wake me up. We start working together in a perfect harmony. Both of us are sailing around the world, so it’s not our first rodeo.
06:40 - Frank, our first customer arrives. He must be suffering from the same ailment of getting up too early for the watch as I do. We send him back to bed for another 30 minutes.
07:10 - Huskies Watch (named after University of Washington Huskies) wakes up to the booming “Who Let The Dogs Out” song. First customers arrive after ten minutes. Scrambled eggs with bacon and baked beans is a Sunday special and we quickly fill the orders. We sell many orders of onion bread with peanut butter with a catchy claim of “explosion of flavors”. French toast (bread fried in bacon fat) is popular as well. Huskies are off to work upstairs. I wash a few bowls during the watch handover and we get ready for frozen and hungry Cougars (named after Washington State University Cougars) to arrive for their share of breakfast. They inhale it and clear off to bed quickly. Iain and I eat our breakfast. George is helping us to wash up, my least favorite part. No, we don’t have any dishwasher liquid and wash all the dishes in cold salt water.
09:00 - I check on ingredients for lunch and take a break to write this blog on my Dell Latitude Rugged Laptop, call home on the satellite phone as the internet is up for the next hour or so. Satcom phone doesn’t work for anyone and somehow my email account was drained to the limit. Phil lets me use his email to send a short message home. I check with the skipper if we are changing time zones today (one hour for every 15 degrees of longitude travelled) – if we don’t, lunch needs to be ready for 13:30; if we do, lunch starts at 13:00 and ends at 15:00, but lasts only one hour. It will be at 13:00 today.
11:00 - I start on lunch. It’s rice salad, but I change the name to better sounding “salad with rice”. It’s very simple – all I need to do is chop few things, cook rice, make salad dressing and mix it all up.
13:00 - Happy Hour on deck. The only time of the day both watches meet over lunch. We all eat lunch first, than cover the usual agenda: one-word open of how everyone feels; open forum with variety of topics; race and weather update; boat gift and watch handover. All the rice salad was gone which is a good sign that everyone liked it, or they were very hungry.
15:00 - Happy Hour is over (we move the clocks by one hour). Back to the galley to wash the dishes and bake cakes for tonight. Toffee cake tonight. One for each watch. Easy to mix but either our oven is dying or the baking pans we have are finally expiring too. George came up with a brilliant idea of doing a “boat registry”, like a wedding registry. We will pick items we need for the boat (i.e. good can opener, baking pan, waterproof speakers, etc.) and hope that someone could buy it for us. We will look into it in Fremantle.
17:50 - Cakes are done. We couldn’t find pasta for the lentil bolognese earlier today, so I decided to make the lentil soup according to the recipe I use at home. I forgot we changed time zones. I thought it was an hour earlier and that I could go take a nap for an hour. Luckily, I was corrected. No time for nap. Oh well, I must tough it out and will get a full night sleep and some to recover. Wind continues to strengthen and the boat is now healed over at 30 or so degrees.
19:20 - Huskies Watch is awake, and dinner is ready for them. We serve thick lentil soup. We also have some wraps close to expiration which we heat up and serve with soup. Warm soup on a cold day with fast sailing under the kite turns out to be very popular. Both watches polish their bowls and asked for seconds.
20:20 - Dinner is over. George is washing up after dinner as I washed up after lunch. I am getting ready for something I have been looking forward to for the past few days – my first hot water shower in two weeks. I will need to be very efficient as the hot water tank capacity is only 10 liters (same as a bucket).
20:30 - Shower is over. It was quite challenging at 30 degree angle, but the hot fresh water with soap felt so good. I could have spent an hour there. Ten minute shower in the heads after two weeks at sea felt like a day in a spa. Off to bed. I get another perk as a cook - I get to sleep in cook’s bunk tonight, getting a full night's rest and rejoining my watch tomorrow.
PS. A few of my crew mates read this blog and thought it was realistic. Emily thought it read as if she was there.