Return Crew Day 23 – 1 March 2020

By Rory (satphone call to Grant)

All is well on board and everyone is in high spirits after we’ve managed to make good progress over the last couple of days with good winds on a beam reach. We are currently doing 7 knots in ideal conditions. It was Francois’ birthday today and Kristy made a delicious cake as part of the celebration. He sends his love to his family back home whom he knows are thinking of him on this special day. As part of the celebration Robyn managed to catch her first fish ever – a 7kg Yellowfin tuna that has already been prepared for sushi starters this evening. It will be followed by other much anticipated fresh fish dishes that everyone is negotiating with each other over.

Unfortunately Nick’s laptop screen got damaged and so we haven’t been able to send blogs. Nick had a backup laptop on the boat during the race to Rio in the event of the first one getting damaged but one of the crew mistakenly took it off the boat in Rio. It’s not too serious as we will contact Grant daily on the satphone to give him an update so that he can write the blog, as is the case with this one. We will also get routing suggestions from Grant based on weather forecasts as we don’t have access to these now – our recent routings have been based on Grant’s input when the laptop was still working so we will be fine. Interestingly, such shore-based routing advice wasn’t permitted for the race itself and they managed to choose a good routing themselves.

At 4:00am this morning we crossed the Greenwich Meridian. Even though it was barely light, the youngsters on board, namely Cameron, Robyn and Ollie took it upon themselves to dive overboard to mark the achievement.

We had some challenges with the batteries not charging on our approach to Tristan da Cunha of course. So Cameron and I spent some time troubleshooting the charging system today and discovered that one of the soldered connections on the house batteries was faulty. After re-wiring the connection to the batteries they charged really well and the engine started perfectly, which was very comforting to discover.

We plan to stay on our current ESE routing until we are much closer to Cape Town and will then head up towards the Cape on the outer edge of the high pressure system. We all wish our loved ones the very best and look forward to seeing them in about one week from now.