Archive for February, 2020

Return Crew day 21 - 28 February 2020 By Clare The wind is up and so is our speed .We hope you are following our progress on the race tracker .The only down side is that it can be difficult for the sleeping crew at night and producing food for the ever hungry hoard has some very challenging moments. Yesterday morning the full kettle took a leap and dived off around the back of the gimbal-mounted stove, resulting in the handle needing to be ... Read more

Return Crew Day 20 - 27 February 2020 Robyn Wolstenholme I want to start off by saying that I may be rudely interrupted by a fish on the line. Each time I write the blog I am find myself holding a fishing rod halfway through the blog. So let’s see what happens. We have had strong south easterly winds since leaving Tristan and we often hit lulls in the wind leaving us with confused winds and 3kts of speed. There has been a very ... Read more

Return Crew Day 19 - 26 February 2020 Kristy Whillier And so the final stretch of the trip has come, and although we’ve been experiencing minimal wind that can’t decide if its ‘Arthur or Martha’, whereby its constantly changing direction, we are all feeling refreshed and ready to complete the sail back to Cape Town. We did, however, start the return off with a swim in the icy Tristan Da Cunha water considering we couldn’t score a warm shower from the locals! But ... Read more

Return Crew Day 18 - 25 February 2020 By Cam Greetings all! We have had an amazing day on the island of Tristan da Cunha. We are going to keep this blog short as we are all quite exhausted from the full day we have had. Some of us started the day slowly while others had decided to sort out the 25L tanks. Waking up I came onto deck to find empty canisters lining the side with a hard working Ollie and Rory ... Read more

Return Crew Day 17 - 24 February 2020 By Cam So we made it guys! I cannot express how happy we all are! The last 24 hours have been interesting to say the least but let’s start at the beginning. Yesterday we had a very simple lunch of beer bread and some cup of soup. It has been cold lately and this allowed for us to keep nice and toasty. Heading towards sunset all the young’uns, aka under 35s, were chilling in the ... Read more

Return Crew Day 16 - 23 February 2020 Oliver Menhinick So as I sit here writing the day 16 blog, Francois preps the second bunch of fish from yesterday’s catch in a similar way to the he prepped it for last night’s braai that we had. While braaing the fish, Kristy made delicious coconut rice with honey drizzled sweet potatoes. I was helming the boat and out the corner of my eye, I saw a silver flash in the water. I looked ... Read more

Return Crew Day 15 - 22 February 2020 Robyn Wolstenholme The art of bread making is improving. I made regular yeast bread yesterday which came out really good. It left me with dough all over my hands leaving me no choice but to add peanut butter to it and clean my hands with my mouth. For dinner we had a pumpkin, baked bean and meatball stew which was made by Ollie and Tony and was really tasty. Having been at sea for over ... Read more

Skippers log - week two - 21 February 2020 By Rory Rochat The theme of the first week of the voyage was “getting going”. Initially we made excellent headway for a couple of days with the crew in good spirits until we sailed into bad weather. The reality of sailing in challenging conditions was a rude awakening, particularly for the new sailors who suddenly realized just how tough sailing can be in these conditions. Huge seas, sea sickness, torrential downpours, being constantly ... Read more

Return Crew Day 14 - 21 February 2020 Francois Meyer Two weeks in and finally the inevitable happened… Clare noticed that I was the only one to not have written a blog. So here I am sitting below deck on my first blog duty. My days of hiding quietly in plain sight have come to an end. Life on board continues as usual, the flat glassy waters have given way to a mild North-Easterly swell while the motionless air has been replaced by ... Read more

Return Crew Day 13 - 20 February 2020 By Clare Cole We have had 2 days of good wind and finally the motor is having a good rest. We had growing concerns that having motored continuously for what felt like a week,(actually only 50 hours in total) that we would run precariously low on fuel before our scheduled refuel stop in Tristan. Rory and Tony witnessed the biblical phenomenon of the “never dropping” fuel gauge - whether this was true or apparent we ... Read more