Race 6 - Day 1
Crew Diary - Race 6 - Day 1
23 January

Mother Watch fun

Mother Watch is a love-hate relationship. After a relaxing night watch, spending three hours watching the stars and trying to find constellations, not usually seen in rainy England which was mind-blowing finished. And Shark Watch (my watch), had six hours to sleep but I get woken up in advance to do breakfast. My precious sleep robbed from me.

Breakfast had an interesting dynamic with myself and Sophie struggling with sickness, Sophie spent all night getting the bread proved and baked for everyone and woke me up to help set up, ready for both watches. The boat was bobbing along a lot and the heat is insufferable making the galley, which had the heat from the oven added to it, go well over 30°C and rising with humidity. That would cause anyone to go insane, the system that we came up with to tackle the problem was, whilst one was sticking her head out the hatch the other one would serve the crew members and when the one who is serving the crew can’t cope they would tap out and swap around. The hate relationship.

After everyone has had their food, drinks and gone to bed, we cleaned everything as quickly as we could, trying not to be sick (which takes a strong will and mind), and promptly throw ourselves into our bunks with the whole morning and evening to ourselves. The love relationship. Now as I’m writing this Sophie and I are sitting in the galley with fans pointing at us waiting for lunch to come around to face the heat and terror of cooking in the tropics on a Clipper Race yacht.

The last couple of days have been interesting, the Le Mans start was very fruitful as we ended up in the top three, and we have been able to hold that lead over the rest of the fleet for 24 hours. We are all trying very hard to keep our second place as well as catching up with Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam so morale and motivation are high at the moment. Shark Watch faced their first squall yesterday and it was very anti-climatic! We hit the edge of it and had high wind and rain for a few minutes before watching as we sailed away from something that could have spiced things up a bit. Despite that, it proved to us that as a watch we work well together because there was a lot to do when facing something like that with a spinnaker flying.