Hello,
Things are going well on Dare To Lead. We’re in Stealth Mode and will be for another 12 hours after this so if you came for insights into how we’ve been going, unfortunately you're not going to get too much. Things have been fairly steady, no big hiccups though. It was our youngest round the worlder Megan’s birthday today! We had a lovely but short celebration on deck before her watch promptly went down to bed for some well earnt sleep. She’s now back on deck for her night watch, with enforced birthday hat on head. Amanda, her mother, even managed to make some buns for the occasion, on the same gas bottle we were convinced was going to run out over a week ago.
For those uninitiated (which I suspect is most) about halfway into our trip we got through our second bottle of gas in five days, and then the next day when we checked the fresh one, it felt like it was almost empty again. DTL is no exception to the fact that we run on hot drinks, and the prospect of not having any let alone no hot meals for the last week or so coming in wasn’t one we wanted to toy with, so gas rationing started immediately. We estimated that we might have one day left in the bottle, but the next day came and went with no gas change and five days later, gas is still going strong. On day seven we thought it had finally packed in, and I’d gotten all the kit ready to change bottles but when I got on deck it turned out that we had in fact, not turned the gas on when requested and so the bottle has gone on strong.
Yesterday we had another scare with it being empty but no, just another false alarm and a closed valve and the regulator. Now on day 10 we’ve been baking four loaves of bread a night and boiling water with the gas again, but our magical Chinese gas bottle defiantly lives on.
That’s about all I can tell you for now but watch this space, we’ll be out of Stealth Mode at 1800UTC and we are taking bets on our location when we pop back up.
Charlie, Ryan and the DTL team.