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Joy of Shamrock Quay - Day 5 on the Ocean



Graham

Firstly a big thanks to all our followers, supporters and fans. Apologies for not updating our log sooner.

The crew on Joy are now fully into our daily and night time routine. The asymmetric spinnaker has now been up the whole time since our last report less a couple of hours this afternoon.

Hand steering is the only option to guarantee best speed and prevent the spinnaker getting wrapped, so one of us is on the helm all the time. Daytime is fine as we are all up and doing odd jobs, cooking, cleaning, reading, trimming sails etc. Night time is more difficult as we each take it in turns, 3 hour watch at a time. The last hour of the 3 hour watch is a real struggle. Loud rave type music is my choice for staying awake, how skip manages to sleep next to the speaker is a mystery.

Quality of sleep is determined by the following equation:

Sea swell + wind direction + point of sail, divided by tiredness of crew minus the skill of the helmsman. (some sleep better than others)

Yesterday and the day before, we had very light winds. This does not suit Joy as she is very heavy compared to most of the production yachts in the rest of the fleet. We spent a few hours trying various sails plans, each time trying to calculate which gave our best VMG (quickest direction to sail in, to get from A to B). Each time we came back to our original plan which is to raise as much sail as safe to do so and then sail as close to directly downwind as possible. This is very frustrating in light winds as we know all the other boats are performing much better.

However yesterday afternoon the winds changed in our favour. We have now had continually 15 - 20 knots for the last 24 hours so we hope that we can pull a few places back from the lighter boats.

Today we had our first encounter with Atlantic squalls, well almost. We were all in the cockpit discussing the black clouds around us when we finally decided that one of them might be a squall coming towards us. Skip ordered us to drop the spinnaker, and just as we had it down the winds starting gusting 30 knots. We spent the next 2 hours sailing in strong winds being passed by angry dark clouds.

I can't close without mentioning the fine cuisine that we have managed to prepare whilst at sea. Yesterday we had a traditional roast and the day before honey and rosemary lamb (actually turned out to be beef) with Moroccan couscous. Susie bakes fresh bread every day and chocolate brownies today, and we are well into our second jar of Jez's home made mayonnaise.


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