Day 5 – Wednesday 8 January.

By Grant Chapman.

Everyone slept very well and the sea had settled during the night, allowing us to put up the big purple scout spinnaker with the wind at a steady 16 to 20 knots from the South. We maintained a north west bearing to avoid the Low developing to the east that we had seen on our rather out-dated GRIB files and to skirt the high that we knew was likely to be to our West. We were aiming for 25 degrees south as our apogee latitude on our routing to Rio. Given the sunny conditions Peter took the opportunity to demonstrate to the rest of the crew the art of showering off the stern of the boat secured in a harness, duly followed by the ladies who then took their turns. We surfed south east swells all afternoon with the genoa slightly furled because we had noticed the leading edge beginning to fray, presumably from storm damage. We tried putting up the big orange gennaker which flew magnificently for a short while until we realized that we had become overpowered and needed to bring it down quickly and revert back to our genoa. The gennaker halyard had actually started to shred in the spinlock under the massive load. In the chaos that ensued while sorting out the gennaker lines and guys Virgil lost his shorts and shirt that were drying on the guard rail. With the warmer weather we looked like a floating clothes horse as everyone hung out their wet clothing and for some their bedding to dry. We noticed a large container vessel off our port side heading east towards the Cape. The cooks discovered that the chicken had gone vrot and threw it over board at almost the same time that we caught a nice 3kg Skipjack Tuna which Virgil baked for us with a delicious relish of onions, tomatoes, green peppers and mash. Shortly after catching the Skipjack we must have sailed over a school of really big fish as they ran out the lines on the reels and broke off the lures as soon as we applied the tension on the lines.

We set course for 3000M and spent the whole night surfing down the face of the waves under our first moonlit and starry night. The red sky at night, as the saying goes, was to be a “sailor’s delight” as opposed to a red sky in the morning being a sailor’s warning and we looked forward to another sunny day tomorrow. We seemed to have passed through the sweet spot we aimed for as we were on the 1014hPa isobar and noticed we had left the bad weather storm clouds to the east and south of us. Grant gave the crew an impromptu lesson on how the ocean wind systems work and what GRIB files were and how we were using them to determine our best course with the provided forecasts.