Day 21 – Friday 24 January 2020
By Daniel Skriker & Matthew Williams
Our previous blogs have often spoken about our daily routine and life onboard so we thought we’d unpack exactly what this entails a bit more. We work on a rotation of 2 hours on watch and 6 hours off. The watch partners are Daniel & Matt, Josh and Mika, Nic & Max and Ewan & Dom. While on watch, the crew are responsible for steering the boat, trimming the sails and keeping a watch for other vessels.
When we are off watch, we take turns with cooking and cleaning.
Dan and Nic also spend time at the chart table plotting our course and taking care of communications with the race control.
I woke up for my morning watch to Ewan and Josh asking “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”. The bad news was that we are down to one 5kg bottle of gas. The good news was that we have lots of charcoal left. The crew would later spend the rest of the day planning our meals more strategically to cope with the gas shortage.
During our lunchtime watch we were cruising along the South Atlantic at 8-10 knots with the spinnaker up. About 45 mins into the watch we hit a squall. When a squall hits we experience strong winds and rain. We gave the call for all hands on deck and the spinnaker was quickly dropped and repacked, ready for its next hoist. Unfortunately this didn’t happen again. Over the last 12 hours we have experienced winds of 15-22 knots which is too much for our light-weight spinnaker.
We sailed for the rest of the day with our genoa poled out, averaging a comfortable speed of 7 knots. Around 01h00 we started to become overpowered and couldn’t sail on track well enough. Josh was due to come on watch at 02h00 so he came up and helped us drop the pole and drop the main sail to first reef. We were still holding speeds of 6-8 knots. While surfing down a wave, Mika hit the new top record of 14.4 knots!
An incoming rain squall with strong gusts
Our poled-out genoa when the wind was too strong for our light-weight spinnaker. We still managed to achieve 7 knots like this.