Day 19 – Wednesday 22 January 2020

We had a pleasant surprise yesterday when we had a sudden downpour which allowed us to soap up on deck and have our first decent fresh water shower on the trip. There have been several suggestions previously that once we are close enough to Rio we can use our drinking water to shower so the timing was good. Even those on the helm at the time managed to multitask as they steered and washed themselves at the same time. Unfortunately two of our crew members in their bunks down below were a little slow in getting on deck for the occasion and after having just soaped up the rain suddenly stopped so they had to use seawater to wash off which didn’t amuse them.

We’ve been climbing up to a higher latitude as there is a high pressure with little wind developing ahead of us that we want to avoid. Once we get up to level with the Trinidad islands at about 20 degrees we then plan to start curving round to Rio. The GRIB files we’ve been downloading have been quite accurate after experiencing the weather that they predict and it looks like there’s a bit of a storm developing off the coast in a week’s time so we should hopefully have good winds then.

We’ve managed to fine tune the putting up and taking down of our spinnaker and have it down to an art now with competition between the different pairs on duty ensuring that we do it efficiently. We’ve also been very careful not to damage it as it key to our success in getting to the finish in a good time and the return crew also need it of course. One of the guard rails detached itself when the spinnaker pole dropped onto it while we were lowering it but we managed to repair the rail and fortunately there was no damage to the pole which one of our Sea Scout Base scouters Gunther had kindly had made for us with a thicker gauge aluminium after our old one had snapped in half on the boat’s trip to St Helena last year. Admittedly it had been used as a bowsprit at the time which isn’t what it is designed for.

Life on board has become very settled and although we are constantly managing the sails while on duty we also have lots of time to reflect on our own lives and priorities and are all missing our families a lot. With modern living using cellphones, the internet, social media and TV, all of which we don’t have access to on board, we get to think more about other people and what we want to do with our lives. And although as boys we’re not typically that communicative with each other on such matters it’s occasions such as this one we’re in that allows us to dig deeper in our conversations. It certainly makes one realise the challenges that sailors must have had back in the day when ships used to be at sea for several months at a time each year as they explored the world.