Saturday 31st to Sunday 01st January 2017
After a day of no clouds at all, dark clouds formed on the horizon all around us as the day’s evaporation of the ocean condensed in the cool evening air. As we were pulling in one of the bungee lines at sunset an Oceanic tuna grabbed the lure and found itself turned into sushi very shortly afterwards. The flesh was a very dark red and more gamey than the Bigeye tuna we had eaten previously.
Max and Nick were on cooking and washing up duty and provided a delicious chicken stir-fry with the last of our fresh provisions. We considered that Grant’s brother-in-law Robin had done a fine job of provisioning the boat for us considering our fresh provisions had lasted a week. We still had several cooked meals that been carefully vacuum packed to make them last longer in the fridge that we could start working our way through. Nick ventured so far as to try his first piece of sushi after discovering that the bottle of Appletizer that he had carefully chilled to drink in celebrating the new year turned out to be a bottle of his father’s wine vinegar that his uncle had included in the provisioning. Perhaps he thought that things couldn’t get any worse. For pudding we devoured a fruitcake with Ultramel custard. The return crew had requested that we bring extra Ultramel, biltong and droewors with us for their trip back and we had needed to store these treats in a secret location given how the crew devoured them like a bunch of gannets.
In the early hours of the morning the wind dropped to 5 knots as the High Pressure we were to discover shifted north and enveloped us. We were to experience very little wind for most of the day which was very frustrating as the previous set of GRIB files didn’t predict this at all. Jarrod and Ash took to doing press-ups on the foredeck to keep fit and tone their bodies, no doubt in anticipation of spending a good deal of time showing off their physiques on Ipanema and Copacabana beaches among the local bikini-clad beach goers. We did warn them that the last time this happened after the previous Cape to Rio race the poor chaps had come scurrying back after having inadvertently settled themselves into the part of the beach where the bikinis were worn by people with very pronounced Adams Apples and smuggling bananas. It had taken them several days to summon up the courage to revisit the beaches and they had insisted on having an advance party to scout the area first.
Everyone had by now eventually changed out of their race shirts and caps that had so generously been sponsored for both the race and return crews by Max. It had proven quite a task getting the caps embroidered in time before the race as we had left it somewhat late to place our order on the scout shop in Claremont as they had to source a local manufacturer of caps for us, Scouts worldwide having a policy not to by Chinese clothing due to child labour practices there and being a youth organization. Yolande put in the extra hours to deliver the goods though and both the shirts and caps were of terrific quality.
Today was the day that the racing fleet with IRC ratings greater than 1 started their race in cape Town, also at 14:00 Bravo. We had taken several bets with some of them that they wouldn’t catch us but considering our current progress we weren’t feeling so confident any more. We did have almost 900 miles under our belts though and provided we didn’t suffer the really bad luck of repeatedly getting caught by the centre of the High Pressure on our trip across to Rio now that we were pretty much at the right latitude of 25 degrees south and 5 degrees east.
While we had a lull in the wind everyone took the opportunity to take a dip, attached to the boat with lines in case the wind picked up suddenly with Ash and Max donning goggles to inspect the hull and prop. If the crew are looking very skinny in the pic it’s because they were – not much was eaten in the first 3 days as everyone battled with seasickness and they were only just beginning to get their appetites back. Nick pointed out that the end-caps on the spreaders were snagging the white spinnaker and decided to sort it out by going up the mast in the bosun’s chair to tape them up with duct tape. Just before a nice breeze kicked in again we caught 3 small Dorado all at once, probably because they are renowned for being attracted to floating objects out at sea. We would enjoy these delicious fish as starters before our pre-cooked chicken schnitzels which we had already defrosted ready for supper. While baking a wholewheat bread for lunch we also baked potatoes for supper to optimize the gas we used so it was very easy preparing the evening meal. We had lost about 8 hours during the day to very slow progress of 1-2 knots while we sat in the high pressure zone that had moved up to engulf us but come 2:00pm UTC we were off again at a reasonable clip for the rest of the afternoon.For several hours before supper Jarrod kept us transfixed with how he made custom knives, showing us some of those he had brought with on the trip, one with his own version of a Cape to Rio logo embossed on it, together with pics on his phone of all the many knives he had made to date. There was a new moon which helped explain why the high pressure had moved off and we were well on our way now across to Rio.
