Archive for January, 2020

Day 27 - Thursday 30 January 2020 By Nicholas Chapman and Daniel Skriker We recently spent a day bobbing along in hardly any wind and chose the opportunity to swim around the boat to get some much needed exercise and take our minds off the thought of not managing to make it to Rio before the race cut-off time on Sunday. We also noticed that the yacht Indulgence which was at a lower latitude than us and which we thought we had overtaken ... Read more

Day 25 - Tuesday 28 January 2020 By Max Elsworth Night watch was cool last night because we had bioluminescence for the first time in a while. The clouds were also gone, so we could see the night sky again and enjoy it with awe. Waking up to the sound of the fishing reel spinning was music to our ears and we all jumped out of bed and ran to the reels (even the vegetarian) only to lose the fish to a big ... Read more

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 ... Read more

Day 23 - Sunday 26 January 2020 By Dominic Holling and Mika Wessels By Dominic Although it is one of our less regular activities, clothes washing do still occur. Whoever takes it upon them to do the washing does it for everyone. Lunch is usually the time where we all get together and have a chill time with the whole crew. Since we have been running low on gas, we can no longer make our bread, a highlight of the day. So we have ... Read more

Day 22 - Saturday 25 January 2020 By Nick Chapman and Max Elsworth We've been progressing nicely staying close to the 20 degrees latitude line for the past few days and altering course slightly to optimise our speed with the changing wind which was blowing at between 12 and 15 knots most of the time. Late yesterday we spotted the Ilha da Trindade islands (admittedly from the top of the mast thanks to Ewan and then Josh who went up to confirm it). ... Read more

Day 21 - Friday 24 January 2020 By Daniel Skriker & Matthew Williams Our previous blogs have often spoken about our daily routine and life onboard so we thought we’d unpack exactly what this entails a bit more. We work on a rotation of 2 hours on watch and 6 hours off. The watch partners are Daniel & Matt, Josh and Mika, Nic & Max and Ewan & Dom. While on watch, the crew are responsible for steering the boat, trimming the sails ... Read more

Day 20 - Thursday 23 January 2020 By Ewan Blamire & Joshua Jackson The first few hours of the day were quiet as many eager faces gathered around the cockpit. After our first twelve days of hard sailing we had reached the first major milestone of our long journey, crossing the Greenwich meridian. For many of our crew this was their first time doing an ocean crossing and Dom sat waiting for this precious moment but soon after crossing his words were, “I ... Read more

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 ... Read more

Day 16 to 18 - Sunday 19 to Tuesday 21 January 2020 By Nic Chapman and Daniel Skriker After keeping a very steady position on 21 and a bit degrees latitude for several days and averaging over 7 knots on occassions we hit a bit of a dilemma because our emails stopped working and we also couldn't get GRIB files to plot our weather routing. We eventually learnt that for some reason our data connection had maxed out at 10MB which was odd ... Read more

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 ... Read more