Archives by: Jessica Ford
Day 1 – The calm before the storm
Day 1 - The calm before the storm
The JML Rotary Scout Return Crew cast off at 7am ,as planned, leaving behind many broken hearts on the shores of Rio.
There was no wind to fill our sails, so we motored past the iconic Sugarloaf and the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, taking photographs along the way.
Very soon Ash and Joey hit their bunks, clearly fatigued from their vibrant night life in Rio, while Freddie reclined on the deck with his puffy feet ...
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Friday 20th January 2017
Friday 20th January 2017
After a reasonable start to the day with a fresh breeze the wind started to fade come lunchtime and by the evening we had a meagre 8 knots. Earlier in the day we had discovered that we had in fact managed to get ourselves into 3rd place in our fleet, both for potential line honours and on our IRC handicap. This would be short lived though if we continued to experience light winds as Rotary Scout doesn’t do ...
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Wednesday 18th January 2017
Wednesday 18th January 2017
It was Max’s birthday today and so we set out to give him a nice treat by trying to catch a decent fish for dinner, our fresh provisions having finally run out save for one last packet of bacon for a Hawaiian pizza with the tinned pineapple. Our only options were now tinned ham or bully beef with the latter very low down our list preferences, especially among those who had done the Cederberg adventure at scouts where ...
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Sunday 15th January 2017
Sunday 15th January 2017
There was something about those graveyard-shift watch crew. Either they had a knack for attracting weird events or they were good at fabricating whoppers. Max and Nick made the outlandish claim that at approximately 11:00pm UTC they came under a vicious aerial attack that was sustained for almost two hours. They said that each of them had to duck for cover as they risked being scalped by an enemy with the cruelest of intentions. The perpetrator of this ...
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Saturday 14th January 2017
Saturday 14th January 2017
With our main 365 litre water tank almost empty now we thought it a good idea to transfer some water from the 170 litre tank in the forepeak. We also had seven separate 25 litre containers of water on board as well as a manual reverse osmosis water maker that could produce fresh water from sea water at a rate of 4l an hour. Emptying two of the 25 litre containers into the main tank we proceeded to ...
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Friday 13th January 2017
Friday 13th January 2017
The graveyard shift watch crew had an entertaining start to the day when at just after 2:00am one of the other crew members suddenly appeared on deck and wanted to know what time supper would be served. He was advised that he had already had his supper quite a few hours ago and hearing this he toddled back off to his bunk, not to be seen again for several more hours.
Less than an hour later Grant and Rory ...
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Tuesday 10th January 2017
Tuesday 10th January 2017
The moon set in the early hours of the morning in a red glow, not unlike the sun, after providing some good light for the night’s sailing activities. Having light to sail by at night was a huge plus as it was very disorientating having total darkness around you with nothing to use as a reference point, especially when it was also overcast and you couldn’t use a star to line up the boat with. One then had ...
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Monday 9th January 2017
Monday 9th January 2017
We eventually worked up the courage to venture forth with the white spinnaker up and resolved that we would only fly it at night in the absence of squalls and if there were more than 3 people on deck at the time. Once we were down to 2 people on watch we would drop the spinnaker and pole out the genoa on the spinnaker pole as it was far easier de-powering this smaller sail in a hurry.
Apart from ...
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Sunday 8th January 2017
Sunday 8th January 2017
We had been making it our mission to not broach the boat on our trip to Rio as it inevitably causes some damage in addition to chaos for the few minutes that the vessel is lying on its side, un-steerable with everyone hanging on for dear life. This normally happens when one gets overpowered with the spinnaker up and we had been drilling it into the crew that there always had to be someone at the ready on ...
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Wednesday 4th January 2017
Wednesday 4th January 2017
One of the requirements for qualifying for the race was the ability to do celestial navigation, should our electronics suffer damage and we could no longer rely on our GPS or chart plotter. Our cell phones also had GP devices of course but in theory the GPS signal, a manmade invention, could also possibly be turned off- although highly unlikely- and sunspots can also cause signal loss. So we set about taking a noonday sun sight as we ...
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