Archive for January, 2017

Friday 20th January 2017  After a reasonable start to the day with a fresh breeze the wind started to fade come lunchtime and by the evening we had a meagre 8 knots. Earlier in the day we had discovered that we had in fact managed to get ourselves into 3rd place in our fleet, both for potential line honours and on our IRC handicap. This would be short lived though if we continued to experience light winds as Rotary Scout doesn’t do ... Read more

Sunday 15th January 2017 There was something about those graveyard-shift watch crew. Either they had a knack for attracting weird events or they were good at fabricating whoppers. Max and Nick made the outlandish claim that at approximately 11:00pm UTC they came under a vicious aerial attack that was sustained for almost two hours. They said that each of them had to duck for cover as they risked being scalped by an enemy with the cruelest of intentions. The perpetrator of this ... Read more

Friday 13th January 2017 The graveyard shift watch crew had an entertaining start to the day when at just after 2:00am one of the other crew members suddenly appeared on deck and wanted to know what time supper would be served. He was advised that he had already had his supper quite a few hours ago and hearing this he toddled back off to his bunk, not to be seen again for several more hours. Less than an hour later Grant and Rory ... Read more

Monday 9th January 2017 We eventually worked up the courage to venture forth with the white spinnaker up and resolved that we would only fly it at night in the absence of squalls and if there were more than 3 people on deck at the time. Once we were down to 2 people on watch we would drop the spinnaker and pole out the genoa on the spinnaker pole as it was far easier de-powering this smaller sail in a hurry. Apart from ... Read more

Sunday 8th January 2017 We had been making it our mission to not broach the boat on our trip to Rio as it inevitably causes some damage in addition to chaos for the few minutes that the vessel is lying on its side, un-steerable with everyone hanging on for dear life. This normally happens when one gets overpowered with the spinnaker up and we had been drilling it into the crew that there always had to be someone at the ready on ... Read more

Monday 2nd to Tuesday 3rd January 2017 We heard that one of the yachts in the 2nd start, Black Pearl, shot out of Cape Town like a champagne cork, doing over 20 knots. Considering we were only doing an average of 6-7 knots we would be needing to look over our shoulders quite soon.  In a following swell we were sometimes momentarily achieving up to 14 knots of speed as the boat surfed down the waves. Every time the boat accelerated down ... Read more