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Milanto - Log Day 4 - Things gets going



Day 4 - Things start going.

So we boarded our 'train' at around 9pm yesterday (Monday) evening. It began life as the casual country variety, which even had halts or two for us to take in the view, but by around 01:30 this morning it morphed into something far more expressive. We, the crew, are divided into two 'watches', each rather neatly I'd say, having one German and one Brit. But what stands each apart, is B Watch's Frenchwoman (will anything ever change!), and our own American who makes up the happy trio that is A Watch, of which I myself am apart; a healthy rivalry has developed pretty quickly, and with each responsible for the others smooth passage during rest time, the stakes are high.

The day is split into 7 watches, but there will be plenty of time for that another day, as for now, there is a locomotive to return to. Our train is now more of the runaway variety than commuter, but in fact I feel a better analogy would be as follows:

Cast your mind back to your early cycling career, a period when you hadn't entirely grasped the requisite repertoire of skills to actually qualify as a cyclist, but bravado and ignorance shielded you from the reality of what might happen should things go really awry. Now imagine if you can, an ill advised turning which took you and your bicycle, not back to the arms of your congratulatory family, but down that infamously treacherous bobsleigh track known as the Cresta Run.

'A Watch' was on when our train really turned rogue at 03:30 on Tuesday. I imagine a curious blend of terror and exhilaration takes hold and guides those maniacs down the Cresta run, and we experienced a similar sensation, when it finally hit us with its gusts of 30 knots plus and 5m waves. We skidded up and down the walls as we tore along our way southbound, but for us the first elated experience of the 'run' ended not in slapped backs and cheers but with a cold hard bucket of water in the face.

We then just had to face the next run, as the following wave immediately lined up behind, and the next and the next, and all this with wheel clenched in hands and in pitch black. By the end we had learnt to surf the waves properly, as well as to duck; and so it continued for an exhilarating 3 hours, eventually under clear skies anda near full moon.

07:00 is the changing of the watches, and one of us goes down below to put the kettle on and rouse B Watch, who in time troop up top to relieve us. And then to bed, and another novel experience. Our cozy little niches spread around the boat, which in the marina gently rocked us to sleep, had changed.

In fact the mayhem up top took on an altogether very different intenseform of chaos down below. I weaved, grabbed, grasped and slipped my way in the dark to my berth in the cheap seats at the sharp end of the boat. The top bow bunk affords the occupant around an eight inch clearance above which lies the pounding waves crashing on the deck, to one side lies hull on which the waves still crash but on to the skin of the boat as it bounces through the sea, finally I am pinned in place by a tabletennis high canvas net called a lee cloth.

On paper really quite cozy, and indeed it is once you have acclimatized, but to the new comer occupant such as myself, it is pretty terror-inducing. Think the inside of a cement mixer full of stones lashed to a runaway truck with little or no suspension, bouncing along a cobbled street on which the council has installed sleeping policemen, and you have a pretty good incite. Still we were back on watch at 11.00, things would be different then.

They always are in daylight...


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