Thursday 29th to Friday 30th December 2016
From the early morning we had good sailing with the heavier white spinnaker under reasonably controllable conditions and then we had a couple of near broaches that we saved by “smoking the guy”, i.e. releasing the line to the spinnaker clew that passes through the beak of the pole to de-power the spinnaker. The only problem was that the second time we did this the guy was released entirely, resulting in the spinnaker wrapping around the forestay several times in very blustery conditions. We tried unsuccessfully to sail off the wrap and then with Max’s suggestion tied the two clews together with a rope and manually unwound the spinnaker by passing the clews around the forestay a few times. We would continue to use this method if we had more than a couple of wraps on the spinnaker. One of the challenges while helming with a spinnaker up was staying alert enough to prevent the boat veering off in the wrong direction when a wave caught her side-on, which inevitably risked having the spinnaker catch the wind on the wrong side and collapse, resulting in a wrap. Making sure that those on watch only helmed for an hour at a time so that they didn’t become exhausted became necessary. We set up the 2-hour watches in pairs with Grant and Albie together, Rory and Mathew, Nick and Max and Jarrod and Ash to ensure that we matched the most experienced sailors with the least experienced. After each 5 days we planned to mix up the watches so that someone didn’t have to suffer the same person’s life stories for the whole trip. We also instituted a cooking, washing up and cleaning regime whereby those whom they were on watch with shared these duties on a rotational basis. This included cleaning the heads which had everyone making sure that they understood how the seacocks worked because someone had already left the outlet one shut and pumped the cistern to the point where it popped the effluent pipe off one of the connectors with the result that it sprayed what they had just deposited in the loo throughout the closet.
We caught a small Bigeye tuna on one of the stern bungees which we had as sashimi and sushi starters before eating our chicken and mushroom pies. We went the full Monty with preparing the sushi, including nori, sushi rice, ginger, soy sauce, wasabi and sushi mayo, all put together with a sushi mat. All of us had very little sleep that night with the sea being very confused and bouncing the boat around as the waves seemed to hit us from all sides. The fact that the deck was littered with squid the next morning was indicative of rough the sea had been. There was also the odd flying fish that hadn’t managed to clear our decks in its flight across our path. Receiving our position report we discovered that we were now coming 3rd in the race on handicap behind Sophie B and Avanti.
The ocean was for the most part remarkably clean and a beautiful azure blue colour with the only rubbish spotted thus far being a neon light bulb floating past, followed by an orange bouy and a plastic bag caught on one of our lures.
The next morning we had to manually pump out the bilges as the automatic pumps had temporarily gone on strike. We also tried the HF radio on th3 4 and 6 MHz ranges but didn’t manage to raise Cape Town Radio. We would try again later that night when transmissions on this log range radio worked more efficiently. Most of the crew took a swim off the stern when we slowed to less than 4 knots during a lull in the wind, discovering that at even 3 knots it was impossible to swim as fast as the boat to catch it. For this reason one needed to wear a harness attached to a rope when taking a dip. Ash and Max tied themselves to a line on the bow so that they could dive in and drift past the boat while taking GoPro footage of her sailing along. They reported that there were a lot of jellyfish in the water and that the visibility was remarkable. There were comments that it was important to hold onto your swimming shorts while swimming as getting stung in the wrong place could be very uncomfortable.
We hoisted the big purple lightweight spinnaker only to discover that we had missed one tear in it so we quickly dropped it and effected a repair before re-hoisting it. We were relieved to discover that this spinnaker still flew well and that our repairs were holding out – at least for the moment that is.
Receiving the latest race report we saw that were now coming 2nd behind Bolero, however we weren’t enjoying favourable winds at the time and were reduced to less than 4 knots of speed over ground so we downloaded our latest GRIB weather files to discover that the South Atlantic High had moved further north than previously predicted and that we were in danger of becoming becalmed by it. We quickly gybed the spinnaker and set off in a more northerly direction to make sure that the High didn’t entrap us and leave us in the doldrums for an indeterminate amount of time. This proved to be a good strategy as within a couple of hours we were back up to 6-7 knots of speed and could change our heading once again to one more north-westerly. As the 5th day passed since the start at 12:00pm UTC we recorded that we had sailed 743 miles, just 7 miles shy of our target of 150 miles a day.