Hot Showers and High Tea!
As a beautiful crimson dawn broke relief followed as the wind built. We had experienced an incredibly frustrating night with winds of 1 knot at their lowest and a boat speed of 0.0 and when you weigh 50 tonnes you are not going anywhere! High hopes over breakfast with the wind blowing a fabulous 12 knots.
So today was kite day! An enormous spinnaker - the unmistakable orange of Big Spirit and the size of one and a half tennis courts - was launched just after breakfast. The knitting that takes place around our decks to achieve this is quite spectacular, with each line carefully run so as not to achieve carnage. Up went one of our enormous spinnaker poles swiftly followed by the orange beast and with the final drop of the yankee and pull of the sheet we were under kite and doing beautifully. The boat speed rose and with that the spirits of the crew as the arrival time in St. Lucia went
up to December 9th as opposed to the rather sole destroying mid-January which was predicted by the GPS during our night time mince.
Mother watch today was Russ and Sam who produced an array of wonderful foods to include freshly baked scones with strawberry jam for afternoon tea! We were just missing the cornish clotted cream! As part of mother watch you have a treat after all the cleaning and cooking and that is a power shower! Hurray! Mother watch I thought would be fun but when I checked the rota that had been prepared I note that I am not on mother watch, which apparently is a perk but that appeared to mean that I would not get a shower! Mmmmm! Panic over! It appears that a third person chosen by lucky dip would get to shower each day and today was my day! So after high tea I pottered off to my hot shower which was wonderful.
We are developing a Big Spirit language which, rather unnervingly, the crew all seem to have created and mastered and it is only day 3. The newest addition to our dictionery is Twangled - an american phrase for getting completely tangled up in one's harness line and the only hope of extraction is to piroutte whilst lifting one leg. This can of course be done to music if preferred!
With people settling into the trip now and some preferred roles and talents in certain areas beginnig to show it is with delight that we have issued the role of Executive Vice President of Lazarette Management to the second mate. This translates to being in control of storage of the large unpleasant, unwieldy and somewhat stinky items in the claustrophobic area at the back of the boat under the wheel to include flattened fenders, rubbish and crew bags. Poor
little soldier! However, as with any job, there is always room for promotion - to President!!!! We all have our littles goals in life.
Back on deck the crew are learning how to fly, trim and eventually drop the big orange kite and after full instructions throughout the day the kite does us proud and makes some fantastic milage for us and after another cracking offering from the galley we prepared to drop the kite and with everyone in position to include a man dangling out over the ocean at the end of the aforementioned spinnaker pole the call came to spike and drop. Down she came in one fluid movement with no hitches and was stuffed down below. The deck was re-rigged and down below the packing team began the herculian task of sorting and packing the kite. This involves tying tiny little pieces of black wool at regular two feet intervals along the kite which by this time had been manoeuvred into the shape of a sausage with two little legs running the length of the boat. This to be done without creating a single twist. This is an artform which takes practice and which the crew, by the end of the race, will have down to 10 minutes as opposed to the current time frame of just over an hour!!!!!
So night watches begin again and some people headed off to their bunks. My team began their duty at 2300 hours and
we chatted our way through four hours putting the world to rights and resorted to naming our favourite television programmes and trying to achieve a boat speed that would make the rest of the crew proud but by 0300 yawns are spotted.
As we flick through our television histories we agree to leave the great scientific delights of the day, to include the fabulously scary Day of the Triffids and The Tripods, to the annuls of history. I also learn during this highly entertaining night watch ramble that the fabulous Blake 7 was in fact all shot in Leeds university!!!
So as we hand over the last 3am-7am night watch we head off to bed leaving the dawn patrol to find boat speed out of 7 knots of breeze.
Em Pontin
Big Spirit