Day 18 – Wednesday 22 January.

By Grant Chapman.

We started to enjoy good winds mid-morning and were averaging a reasonable 6 knots with the purple spinnaker that we had only just put up a couple of hours earlier after the wind backed to a direction off our stern, allowing us to go on a run. After a good few hours of some decent sailing for a change we seemed to be out of the doldrums and making good progress to Rio. We recalculated several times what average speed over ground (SOG) we needed to get to Rio before the race cut-off time in the hope that we could squeeze more time out of what we had left but we always came back to the same result – we needed to do 145 nautical miles per day which meant an average SOG of no less than 6 knots. To achieve this we would need to fly the spinnaker 24×7 and have at least 12 knots of wind.

Marcus reeled in the fishing line on the heavier duty reel after noticing that it had run out almost the whole length of line. It took him a good 30 minutes to get the line in to discover that the lure was covered in black ink and both the tip of the hook and its barb were broken off. No doubt a large octopus or squid must have become entangled on the lure but managed to extricate itself but whether it managed to bite the end of the hook off or it broke under the weight of the creature remained a mystery.

Virgil took the opportunity to do some wake surfing off the stern of the boat, executing various complicated-looking maneuvers and nearly losing his swimming trunks in the wash created by the boat’s hull when a sudden gust caught him by surprise. The poor man could ill afford to lose any more clothing, having waved a fair amount of his wardrobe goodbye after a rather enthusiastic laundering session, hanging his clothes out to dry on the guard rails where the wind plucked them off while most of the crew had retired below decks. We did suggest to him that with any further losses he would be arriving in Rio in his birthday suit.

We continued to try and learn some Portuguese and seemed to have food and drink sorted out – these items being a priority of course. What we were less sure of was the proper pronunciation, Brazilian Portuguese being pronounced quite differently to that in Portugal itself, but we did know that there were a lot more eeshes, eshes and ches in the Brazilian variety. The result was that we ended sounding like a sick steam train as we overemphasized he endings of almost every second word in our efforts to establish our Brazilian credentials.

Unfortunately the weather didn’t play ball with us for doing our star sightings on the sextant when it came to twilight as there was a ring of cloud around the horizon in all directions. Sighting stars needs to be done during the twilight hours of either the morning or evening as one needs to be able to see the horizon and the stars at the same time so that the star can be “brought down to the horizon” in the sextant’s telescope, brought about by the star being reflected first in the index and then the horizon mirror on the sextant, the reading on the arc then giving the angular altitude of the star. With the horizon obscured there was no way to get accurate readings. The clouds cleared shortly after nightfall and a gazillion stars emerged, lighting up the sky with a seemingly impossible brightness in the absence of the moon which hadn’t started its trajectory across our section of the sky yet. The milky way, marking the edge of the centre of our galaxy, revealed a cornucopia of colours that are not typically visible in our light-polluted urban areas with previously unnoticed nebulae filling what might previously have been assumed to be simple voids. Transfixed by the beauty engulfing our small corner of the planet Lorraine set about identifying various galaxies using a star identification app on an iPhone, expressing astonishment at the sheer distances involved with millions of light years separating us from these heavenly bodies. We agreed that it was doing a galaxy a certain injustice naming it something prosaic like NGC1097, especially as it was a mind-numbing 15 mega parsecs away and possibly didn’t exist any more, it’s extinguishing light only reaching future generations of earthlings millienia after such an the event.

Peter would often come on deck for his shift in the early hours of the morning to discover a veritable mess of empty chocolate, biscuit and sweet wrappers form the previous night’s activities and he would comment on how the crew were over-indulging unnecessarily and that he wasn’t getting enough of a look-in with the treats. What he didn’t know is that we were collecting all the wrappers and recycling them each night, placing them strategically for him to discover each morning and taking bets on how long it would take him to expose our scam.

Virgil doing synchronised swimming at 6knots