Day 24 – Monday 27 January 2020
By Nicholas Chapman
Daniel and I were quite tired today after staying up on watch to supervise the rest of the crew with flying of the spinnaker through the night in stronger breezes. Thankfully nothing went wrong and we were able to have a relatively peaceful night. It was really dark though with the rain clouds gathering overhead blanketing out the stars and moon which usually light up the surroundings nicely. The sky over the ocean has a huge number of stars that one doesn’t normally get to see on land with all the light pollution there. We often spent a lot of time discussing the various constellations and trying to identify the various signs of the zodiac. The southern cross appeared most nights, changing its location gradually but then disappeared. Apparently this is one of the reasons why the southern hemisphere’s oceans weren’t explored as much back in the day compared to those in the northern hemisphere where the northern star Polaris remains constant and was always a good reference point for navigators.
At night we make sure that we turn off all the bright white lights on board and only use the red lights that are in the saloon ceiling in order to preserve our night vision. We also only use the red globe option on our specially designed head torches for the same reason. It’s amazing how one’s vision can adapt to darkness but also how exposure to a bright light can then ruin it instantly. It can take over an hour to get one’s night vision back again.
We then got hit by yet another rain squall, the second one in two days with the very first one being all the way back in the first few days of the trip. Ewan, Mika, Matt and I attempted to soap up quickly, only to find that the squall disappeared again before we could wash off. We never hit any extra rain that day, much to our disappointment.
Max (whom I am on watch duty with) and I have discovered the power of outsourcing on the trip in order to avoid cooking and cleaning duties. By bribing Dom and Josh with a few biscuits, chocolate and billing we managed to end up having a nice supper. Our watch time of 18:00 to 20:00 has also brought about many a late meal for our supper. The outsourced labour did make an attempts to appeal for a reward raise after supper though, only to be told by our onboard lawyer in training (Daniel) that their case was flimsy at best and needed to be dismissed without costs.
We have now all managed to make a satphone call to our families as we had enough spare airtime available, which was very rewarding for everyone concerned as it was the first time that we had done so on the trip.