Day 23 – Monday 27 January.

By Grant Chapman.

After a morning of fairly iffy winds pushing us along at no more than 4 knots we started experiencing stronger winds come lunchtime and our speed picked up nicely to a more respectable average of 6 knots. Our daily position report confirmed what we knew already – we had only managed a woeful 121 nautical miles again so the freshening wind was a breath of fresh air for us all.

As the afternoon wore on the wind strengthened more with gusts of up to 20 knots giving us our much-needed boost in boat speed and morale. As the wind was coming from the south while we were wanting to sail a more westerly course we needed to pole the spinnaker out as close to the forestay as possible to maximize our speed on a close reach as gybing and sailing higher wasn’t an option since it would send us too far north. The helming was restricted to Chris, Marcus, Virgil and Grant as Rotary Scout twisted and corkscrewed down the face of a following sea as she picked up speeds in excess of 10 knots on occasion, requiring all one’s strength on the wheel and sharp focus to prevent another broach. The helming partners were tasked with hanging onto the spinnaker sheet with gloved hands and releasing it each time a gust threatened to dip Rotary Scout’s boom into the sea as we heeled over precariously, at one stage soaking Marcus’ bunk after he had left his portholes open for fresh air. With double watches of two hours each on the helm the chaps counted down the minutes to the next watch, especially during night fall when everything became tense and fatigue set in quicker. Cathleen very kindly offered the helmers a neck massage which only Marcus and Gran took up, the others collapsing into their beds. After a very thorough 20 minute massage Marcus offered to reciprocate and gave Cathleen a 20 second neck massage, replying when Cathleen queried if ‘that was all?’ that ‘it wasn’t a good idea to spoil em.’ Earlier in the day during the slow progress in light winds Grant had offered reflexology to any takers thinking that he might get it reciprocated – which it hasn’t been yet – with Peter, Lorraine and Cathleen taking up the offer. However this also backfired on Grant as Cathleen proceeded to pass out in her bunk afterwards leaving Grant to do is watch ion his own – fortunately in light winds at the time.

We had a reasonable quantity of droëwors that was proving too salty to eat on its own so the cooks razzled up a relish of tinned tomatoes with onions and spices to make a delicious wors smoortjie accompanied by rice, beans and sweetcorn followed by our usual pudding. We were quite chuffed to do something useful with the droëwors as there had been talk of ditching it overboard.

The crew that were still up during the shift at twilight all participated in taking sightings on selected stars and planets with the sextant. We managed to successfully sight altitudes of the brightest stars in the sky – Sirius, Canopus and Betelgeuse but failed to drop Capella, Achernar, Fomalhaut and Hamal that the Selected Stars Almanac suggested we could sight for our particular dead reckoning position onto the by now indistinct horizon. This was partly due to these particular stars being several magnitudes dimmer than the first three, the fact that the boat was not exactly a stable platform for sightings as she raced down waves and also our inexperience with using the sextant resulting in the process taking a lot longer than it should have so that twilight passed and we lost the horizon. We also sighted Jupiter and noted her altitude. The other planets in our solar system that are used for celestial navigation were all still below the horizon at the time that we took our sightings. We had previously calculated all the Greenwich and Local Hour Angles, Azimuths and Declinations calculated from the Almanac tables for each of the stars and planet and were pleased to discover all the celestial bodies where we had predicted they should be. We noted the exact time of each sighting and packed our records away for analyzing in the morning to try and plot our position lines to get the coordinates of our location.

Chris and Lorraine on the graveyard shift reported that they had become acquainted with a Flying Fish during the night after it had nearly collided with them in its flight path across the cockpit before knocking into the superstructure on the stern and flopping into the sea. We learnt from the race committee’s daily report that other boats had also suffered the frustration of bringing big fish they had hooked tantalizingly close to the stern only to lose them in the wake behind the stern before they could land them. This didn’t stop Virgil from continuously teasing Grant about how many fish had been lost, despite the fact that he had already dined on a week’s worth of different fish species on the voyage thus far.

Towards the end of Chris and Lorraine’s shift there was a sickening sound of metal smashing into metal as the spinnaker came down for what seemed like the umpteenth time, collapsing into the sea aside the boat. Grant had fortuitously come on shift early and took the helm as Chris went forward onto the foredeck and started hauling the spinnaker out of the water while Lorraine managed the lines. By the time everyone appeared on deck the spinnaker had been recovered and plans were being made to recover the halyard once again from the top of the mast. Marcus stepped up to the plate again and was up the mast in no time. The halyard shackle pin had managed to work loose. It seemed that the red port halyard was jinxed as it didn’t seem to matter what shackle we used as the halyard appeared destined to be a nuisance to us. We placed a new shackle on the halyard and secured it to the spinnaker by mousing the pin using a cable tie through the eye of the pin and around the shackle to prevent it coming out again. Recovering and re-hoisting the spinnaker only took 45 minutes, during which we managed to maintain a boat speed of 5 knots on the mainsail alone so we didn’t lose many miles during the whole saga.