Day 8 – Saturday 11 January 2020

By Mika Wessels

Our shift was amazing. Not only was it the first time on this journey that we didn’t wake up for our watch dead tired, but it was also the first time we stayed up and took on a part of the next watch pair’s time due to our sheer enjoyment of the surroundings. The time was spent conversing, surfing the waves and playing solitaire or soduko (of which I played so much that I see the numbers whenever I close my eyes and probably will for the next few days).

Breakfast was another thing of beauty. It was the second time we made cooked oats and therefore it was all the better for having learnt the secrets of my sailing mates’ taste buds: salt, cinnamon, honey and occasionally a little something special. Josh unlocked a whole new world of flavour by reintroducing me to peanut butter. At first I believed it to be a joke, but after a tester realized the wisdom in his words. I fell in love with it.

In the closing hours of the day we decided to hoist Ewan up the mast to do another rig inspection. However this particular inspection didn’t end in one of the two ways one would assume. Instead it ended up with Ewan glitching a zip-lock bag of breyani and a fork, all the way up at the top of the masthead. How this happened is still a mystery to the rest of us down on the deck below.