Return Crew Day 11 – 18 February 2020

By Cameron Schmidt

It has been 10 days since our departure and I am glad to say we are into full swing. From what I have seen there seems to be some method to all our madness. Some of us take to reading, napping and others Netflix or in Francois’s case, playing cricket on his phone.

For those of you that have been following the tracker you might have noticed that we moved from heading South East to a more direct South in the last 24 hours. The reason being that we have had no wind in the last few days. To put it into perspective the clouds reflect almost exactly onto the water as a near clear reflection. We have been motoring none stop for the last few days and according to the weather reports we will be coming across some wind in the next hour at 15:17. We will have a clear line to Tristan with lots of wind and from there it’s easy sailing!

We have been spoiled rotten these last two days with lots of great food. From Tony and Ollie’s great rice dish last night to the amazing lunch done by Francois and Kristy. We had some delicious baked bread with canned beef and with this we had anything from jams to mustard. I myself even had a go at baking some brownies yesterday for the crew. Well I attempted to as the oven moves about being gimbaled and it caused all the brownie mix in the tray to slant to one side. We did finally have brownies and cookies, which was a huge taker by the crew. We have been trying to catch more fish but have been unsuccessful and currently have the line out from sunrise to sunset. We also take every opportunity to swim and take a look around the boat! We swam yesterday and hopefully will get another opportunity again. We even discovered, thanks to Rory, that we can have seawater showers using a hose at the back of the boat! We sit with shades and hats observing the water for any sign of life! Thankfully with the water being flat we can see wildlife from a nautical mile off.

It is with great sadness that we announce the ending of “Who Got On Board”. Winter has come and sadly we had to do some budget cuts. We would love to get some questions from you all that read this blog. So we begin a new run off called “Rotary tune in! ”As a crew we would love to engage with you and not just sending blogs. We would love for you to grab your HF radios (if you ard fortunate enough to have one) and tune into us. You can send your questions to C2Rio2020@rotaryscout.co.za and we can answer them in the blogs! We just want to make sure we don’t leave any wave unsurfed! We will try get back to you and answer three a day, weather permitting.

We have a question for all the land folk! What might a group of turtles be? Reason for asking is that we have a fellowey friend. Yesteday we spent a bit of time taking some portraits around the boat and came across this little cute stripey fish. He seems to be black and white with thickish white strips. By democracy we named him JEFF and we hope that he may continue to stay with us as we make our way back home. According to Ollie we need to leash him on our fishing rod lines as he is scared we might lose our friend (aka run/swim away). So if anyone knows the answer please pop it in the group and someone will let us know! You are our Google!

Update: we got a bite but sadly the lure was taken. Hopefully we get lucky next time.

Life on board is going well and we are all nicely settled in. We have finally gotten to all the repairs that needed doing and are even looking for ways to better the boat.
Below you will see a group selfie! Just to prove to you we are all alive and well!

Today we have travelled: 118 Nautical Miles
Total: 1223nm
Chow!