Day 24 – Tuesday 28 January.

By Grant Chapman.

The weather Gods must have decided to start smiling on us because we had superb winds all day and through into the night with a steady breeze of 15 knots and gusts of no more than 20 knots. Such benign conditions allowed us to keep the spinnaker up permanently on a broad reach while we barreled along at over 8 knots of boat speed. Even the sea was working in our favour as a huge ocean ground swell rhythmically picked us up on a plateau of water a good 4 metres above the surrounding sea, letting us down the escarpment gently, Rotary Scout purring away with satisfaction. In addition to the ground swell we also had a following sea generated by the wind that accelerated us to top speeds of up to 11 knots on occasion. The possibility of making the race cut-off time seemed very real now and all of our spirits were lifted. We even started to play more upbeat music with Queen blasting from the cockpit speakers while everyone sang along to the more popular tunes, a far cry from the appropriately named Les Misérables music that we had subjected ourselves to the previous day when we all had the morbs. In the early morning we had sat down for a good hour at the navigation station and pored over the latest GRIB files, trying to determine how many hours we could anticipate taking advantage of the 10-15 knot winds that the wind arrows indicated in our intended path. We arrived at a figure of 60 hours before one of those dreadful highs, albeit a very localized and short-lived one closer to the coast of Brazil, conspired to slow down our progress. We also plotted various scenarios on the chart in terms of courses to steer to optimize the good winds and using trigonometry calculated the tactical advantages of sailing higher and faster versus lower on a more direct route to Rio but slower. We came to the conclusion that the extra 60 miles needed sailing to take a higher route over the next 60 hours only gained us an extra 55 miles of distance with a higher boat speed as Rotary Scout’s speed did not increase in a linear relationship with the wind speed: she would happily sail at 6.5 knots in 15 knots of wind but only 7 knots in 20 knots of wind, with a lot more discomfort and a devil of a helm to manage as her weather helm became more pronounced the stronger the wind blew. We also concluded that we needed to start being bolder and take some calculated risks if we were to finish the race in time. The decision was made to run the gauntlet of heading straight for Rio and trying to outrun the high pressure that had positioned itself menacingly just south of our course. A huge bank of alto stratus clouds on the distant horizon off our port bow gave away the likely position of the high and we had 60 hours to try and skirt it.

With the real likelihood of making Rio within the next few days conversation on the boat turned to what shopping in Rio would be like (especially among the girls – the chaps still had their minds fixated on cerveja (beer) and Copacabana beach and the delights that it might bring). Everyone also identified what food they were going to indulge in as soon as they got ashore and unsurprisingly Tunamate, Toppers, Smash, baked beans and even Ultramel custard weren’t mentioned once.

At lunchtime we took a midday sun sight on the sextant and together with the nautical almanacs successfully discovered that we were indeed in the same place on our planet that our GPS said we were. We considered that we had started to master celestial navigation and the almanacs were no longer viewed as heavy doorstops full of bamboozling tables of never ending numbers.

We didn’t bother putting the fishing lines out while we travelling at such a good clip as it was unlikely we would entice a fish onto the lure at 8 knots, let alone manage to land anything we did catch given our past experiences. On several occasions Flying Fish skittered across the waves, disturbed by our intrusion, some of them achieving remarkable distances of up to 40 metres across the top of the waves. Calling them Flying Fish seemed to be a misnomer as they were more like Gliding Fish, their oversized pectoral fins protruding rigidly from their bodies with no flapping evident as they would jettison themselves out of the water and effortlessly glide out of our path. We also noticed a somewhat unusual phenomenon in our wake as the boat ploughed down the faces of waves in that we left behind a trail of bubbles, like we were continuously ditching bucketfuls of detergent off our stern. It seemed to be associated with higher aeration of the warmer waters now that the sea temperature was a balmy 280C but perhaps there was something more complex going on.

The girls taking time out from male company

Peter with the sea foaming from the stern