Race 1 - Day 2
Crew Diary - Race 1, Day 2
03 September

Harriet Mcdonald
Harriet Mcdonald
Team Zhuhai
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The ‘race of your life’ day two – it doesn't seem possible. I feel like we’ve been out here for a fortnight already. Everything is so goddamn hard – going for a tink takes about 30 minutes, nevermind doing anything useful. It was busy with a series of unplanned interruptions – several pints of milk spilling into the onions so that needed clearing out, the generator seems to have some issues, so our engineer spent two hours in the engine room which he said wasn’t fun. One of the heads is leaking and now out of action – so the other one is action packed, bit smelly and often has a queue.

Given its early days, we are just getting our sea legs aka- a bit of puking going on and everyone adapting to moving around at a deeply uncomfortable angle. We’re getting there. It’s amazing how many things you just stop caring about or even thinking about – to be honest I don’t think I’ve thought about anything other than my next task and getting through it.

They call Leg 1, Level 5 training which makes sense – but as a team, we are getting better all the time (not sure the Skipper agrees) but we think we are. In between it all he is trying to survive, we have had some good laughs and my two highlights from this mornings 4am to 8am watch was seeing three dolphins and watching Dave wash up the chilli con carne pan over the side – very impressive, bet he doesn't do the dishes at home.

So far so good but very hard