Day 12,13,14 & 15 – Wednesday 15 – Saturday 18 January 2020
By Nicholas Chapman
Our apologies for the delay in sending our blog. I’m afraid we’ve been flat out trying to maximize our speed by swopping sails continuosly – well that’s our excuse but we’ve admittedly also been having a swell time on board (excuse the pun) cooking all sorts of amazing meals and having interesting conversations. Life on board is really wonderful and apart from the responsibility of being on watch we are all enjoying a new found independence that one doesn’t typically experience in day to day living. Everyone is getting on really well and our choice of watch partners has worked out nicely. This may change going forward but right now it seems to be working a treat – well that’s my observation and I could be wrong of course!
We’ve been flying along at over 6.5 knots on average and our crew members who did the St Helena trip on this yacht – Ewan and Josh have been amazing at managing the different sails which we’ve been giving a lot of attention to. Max and Matt have also proved themselves to be very competent watch partners to myself and Daniel and have learnt the ropes very quickly, asking very pertinent questions and putting us on the spot with our sailing knowledge. We’ve also been enjoying amazing meals that our resident chef Dom has been preparing with Mika’s guidance in terms of the quantities involved – we do need to request that we want more than just starters and hopefully we won’t run out of provisions with such requests. With the Tuna finished now we are resorting to more canned food which doesn’t quite match up to that delicious fresh fish.
Just when we thought we were probably overtaking everyone else in the fleet with our extremely efficient sailing, Love Water and Maserati overtook us, apparently doing 4 times our speed. Eish, nothing like a bit of stiff competition to put things in perspective and knock our inflated ego somewhat. Well I don’t think think they enjoyed any Tuna on their trip thus far and we didn’t notice any braais on their pushpits. At least they seemed to have followed our track from the start which was a bit of a compliment.
The sunsets each day are amazing and seem to last forever before they then suddenly disappear over the horizon. Apart from the trimarans we have only seen two other container ships so far. Apparently we can only see about 7 miles at our elevated position above sea level before the horizon dips out of view so it’s not surprising that we don’t see any of our other competitors. We get a daily report on their positions so we know that they aren’t too far away. We’ve also had radio comms with some of them which is really nice as it makes us realise that we aren’t totally alone in this huge ocean.