Day 2 – Sunday 05 January 2020

By Dominic Holling

We woke up this morning noticing it was a bit cloudy and saw for the first day that we had lost our sight of land. The night watch was pleasant; there was still a gentle breeze blowing through and we had little speed. For most of the day the wind was averaging 8 knots. Nothing too eventful happened in the morning, besides Max seeing what he has dubbed, “a flying brown penguin”, circling around us. We could still see Ronin, the last of the fleet in our near vicinity. We started to get chatting with them over radio asking about conditions and how they were doing; it’s always nice to have someone to talk to. We chatted over breakfast, lunch and supper. No has gotten seasick yet and everyone is holding strong. We were changing our foresails throughout the day, between our light wind genoa and main genoa. Breakfast is always done individually and always ends up happening at 11:45 followed by a light lunch at 12:00. Seriously. When not on watch everyone was mostly sleeping down below. We went to the aft cabin and admired Nick’s massive double bed and threatened to steal it. While there we found some of Nick’s granny’s delicious biscuits, which he quickly shared around the crew. Josh was sitting on the foredeck when he noticed some dark water and swell. He warned all of us of this and then like a movie, we all got suited up in our foul weather gear, and secured everything. Then we all sat there and waited patiently for it to hit us. Unfortunately Josh was mistaken and all that came was light rain and an increase in swell. I began making our dinner of curry and some left over mac and cheese. It tasted amazing and Max ensured that everyone had thirds! After dinner, the wind was very calm. I went to the sugar scoop to admire the view and felt the water, and that’s when we knew it was time for our first swim. So we went straight from full foul weather gear to boardie’s and all took it in turns to jump in as the boat bobbed away. It was a fun time swimming away as we were doing only 2 knot of speed. We got the polo ball out and played around, swimming around the boat. Afterwards we all got dry and freshened up. The night was then upon us and everyone headed to bed. In the night the wind started to pick up a bit and at one stage the spinnaker was raised for a few minutes and then lowered. The rest of the night was peaceful – it was just us for miles and we couldn’t see Ronin anymore, or any land.

All in all it was a great day at sea with light winds and a much appreciated swim.