Day 6 – Friday Evening 10 January

Day 6 - Friday Evening 10 January. By Grant Chapman. Shortly after we had settled down for the evening, having finished the daily blog entry and awaiting the tuna bake that was about to be served, things suddenly changed. The game fishing rods off the stern of the boat came alive as something big started running out the line on both reels like there was no tomorrow. Grant leapt off the helm which he handed over to Chris and Marcus was summoned from ... Read more

Day 6 - Friday 10 January. By Grant Chapman. The sun rose a lot later this morning as we started to move in a more westerly direction, the sky only becoming light after 4:00am Zulu (UTC – Universal Time Coordinataire or Greenwich Mean Time) which is 6:00am Bravo of course (SA Time). We had set our watches to UTC time on the second day out of Cape Town as all race correspondence was communicated to us based on UTC and without any means ... Read more

Day 5 - Thursday 9 January 2014. By Grant Chapman. We have sunshine again, a mild sea and fair south south east winds at 16 knots, as we had predicted from the sunset the night before. We goose-winged the genoa out on the pole in a following sea. Mark told us via SATphone that we were now in 4th place on handicap in our division. We assumed this is because we had gone north while the others had gone west. We were comfortable ... Read more

Day 5 - Wednesday 8 January. By Grant Chapman. Everyone slept very well and the sea had settled during the night, allowing us to put up the big purple scout spinnaker with the wind at a steady 16 to 20 knots from the South. We maintained a north west bearing to avoid the Low developing to the east that we had seen on our rather out-dated GRIB files and to skirt the high that we knew was likely to be to our West. ... Read more

Day 4 - Tuesday 7 January 2014. By Grant Chapman. We were still running with the swell in the early morning with a southerly wind pushing us along in a north westerly direction and a bit of blue sky starting to appear. Mid-morning we goose-winged the genoa out on the pole and started moving along nicely at 9 knots. Our previous thoughts of what the hell we thought we were doing embarking on this journey started to dissipate and we were back in ... Read more