Good morning Black Betty fans, it's hot, hot, hot on board, and I mean hot. I started yesterday evening's team meeting with a massive lie, and before telling the lie I told the crew I was about to tell them a huge stinker of a porky. Let me explain, Leg 5 and 8 crew member Mel Morris asked me to tell her it wasn't going to get any hotter, so that's what I told the team! It's most definitely IS going to get hotter as we still have 570 miles to go until the Equator, but just for a little while we pretended that is not the case.
Racing wise we have continued to trade points of a mile with Rob and his motley crew aboard the good ship Imagine your Korea, we have been in line of sight of those guys for three if not four days now. It’s starting to feel like there is a rather substantial length of bungee connecting our boats together, every time we start to separate we seem to end up pinging back together. As I mentioned yesterday this great for keeping the team focused and squeezing every last point of boat speed out of Black Betty that we can.
As predicted, it’s proving to be very interesting looking at which teams have chosen to start their 4 degrees/36 hours of motoring. We don't get told when the other teams have started motoring, so we are attempting to make an educated guess by assessing the course, speed and mileage covered by each team as scheds come in every 6 hours. Where to make the decision to use our engine is quite crucial, tactically there could be some places to gain or lose......only time will tell.
In other none sailing news, Leg 4,5 and 6 crew member Sophie spent some time constructing a rudimentary sun shelter for the kite trimmer this morning. It consisted of the bag from our code one, and more bits of rope than I knew we had on the boat! It was quite interesting and amusing to watch it go from its initial concept, through its design development stage, and then tweaked to perfection. By the time she was finished it was a work of art, the on watch joked that she needed a hat on the deck for us to throw coins into, and a scruffy yet friendly dog to sit with her in her hidey hole from the tropical sun, the things we do to make life in this heat more bearable.
This leg has seen the introduction of a few organisational changes aboard Black Betty, I have already mentioned that, for this leg, we have flipped our watch system timings so that our long watches are at night which is working beautifully, the long 6 hour watches on deck at night are currently a firm favourite. We have also ditched the old watch names, I meant to mention this in an earlier blog, but totally forgot. So goodbye Crime watch and Bay watch, and hello Shark watch and Bird watch! For our future leggers, these names are always open for a refresh at the start of each leg, so get your thinking caps on.
Another tweak we have done is that we now have assistant watch leaders, this has a whole bunch of benefits, one of them being that the watch leaders are now included in our galley rota, so they get a day away from the deck, a fresh water shower and a full night's sleep every week or so, just like the rest of the team. Yesterday for the first time since leg 1 RTW'er Kaz Smith attempted bread baking. After hours of hard work, care and attention and time in the oven Kaz revealed her bread....well...hmmmmm, light and fluffy it was not. It's fair to say that it was not going to be consumable, it came out so dense that I was fearful that if it got dropped it would have punched a hole straight through the hull. As the 'bread' was discharged overboard the noise it made was the noise, I imagine an ingot of lead would make if it was slung into a vat of custard. Speculation was rife that on its rapid journey to the bottom of Davy Jones's locker there was a fair risk of it knocking out a dolphin or two. As I am sure you won't be surprised to find out the rest of the team made no jokes at all, and removed no Michael from Kaz whatsoever. As the day went on it became clear where the problem lay...there was one key ingredient missing, the yeast!
That's it for today, the nav station is baking hot and I have to escape, the only question is, head on deck and try and find some shade, or head to my bunk to attempt to gain some sweaty slumber.
Black Betty OUT!