Jack Rowland Smith - Log Day 9 - JACK Rowland Smith Half Way Celebrations

At about midnight last night, eight and a half days after leaving Las Palmas, JACK and it’s motley crew crossed their halfway mark in this journey across the Atlantic. We have sailed 1,450 miles and our routing has a total trip length of 2,900 so we are officially half way. We have averaged about 7.1 knots so far.

Day 9 started with the realisation that we had finally arrived. The Atlantic swell, with its huge scope, just rolled in and lifted the boat gently up and over the top of each wave. There are no breaking crests, just a huge swell. It was a quiet morning but the sun was out and the forecast was for a great tradewind day.

The night before had been quiet so a pretty well rested crew assembled for breakfast of scrambled egg, bacon and tomato on “home baked” toast all cooked by the skipper. During breakfast we noticed we were still flying the Spanish courtesy flag, this triggered a discussion on whether we should have our own courtesy flag and whether, as in International Waters , we could declare ourselves an independent state. Clearly our GDP would be reliant on our fishing industry and therefore reliant on fish caught by the “dynamic duo”, what could possibly go wrong? Well no sooner had the conversation started about independence than Laurel and Hardy were arguing over which one of them would be Prime Minister, no sign of any thought of a democratic process here!! It was never in doubt I would be Chief Whip because without me to act as mediator we would have no economy, Chef Sue would have to be Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and Clare Minister of Health. More later.

Talking of health, I am pleased to announce that Clare has seemingly turned the corner and is now back to her old self. Ben is not happy and has been heard plotting how to change her new seasick tablets for sweets because the nagging intensity has exponentially increased. For the most, the nagging is warranted because for eight days Clare has been under par and therefore parenting support has been given by his auntie “Chef Sue” who clearly sees Ben through very rose tinted glasses, in fact I am not sure they are tinted, more blackened.

The first matter that the newly formed state of Jack needed to sort was the issue of our time zone, lingering due to a disagreement in the crew as to which watch gets lengthened by the necessary one hour loss. Keen to prove a point, out came skipper’s sextant and then a period of sun sights to establish when the sun was at its highest and therefore defining 12.00 for us. With some dodgy calculation and apparently some “averaging” the daily position was plotted on the chart form the sextant readings. Firstly we established was that our 12.00 was actually 14.15 GMT, supporting the discussion that we needed to lose another hour. Without an “elected” prime minister it went to a referendum of “the people” and it was agreed that we would move back one hour immediately, it so happened that the skipper gained an extra hour of watch time........!!!

As to the plot on the chart based on the calculation, well the longitude was within 60 miles and the latitude was close, if we used that plot then we would need to alter course back to about 250 degrees to get to St Lucia and we would more likely end up in Trinidad and Tobago - pretty good as at least they are Caribbean Islands!!! But clearly skipper is no Christopher Columbus otherwise I fear we may be ignorant in a couple of continental areas.........

To dinner and there was a mutiny by Chef Sue who refused to cook Tuna. So chunky chicken, baked beans and rice for most of the crew, the special one (Ben) got his favourite of meatballs!! To show the kind of strange things that happen at sea, John and I had just descended down the hatch into the cabin with the dirty plates when a large flying fish flew straight through a small open deck hatch and landed on the cabin floor behind us. For those who have not seen a flying fish, they are fish with wings and they fly pretty well. However clearly the great creator thought he would have a laugh when these animals when he created them because they appear to have no directional sense at all whilst in flight or maybe no flight control other than up, forward and down. So they periodically land on deck but straight through a hatch window...... and they smell very fishy so whilst skipper and I run around the cabin trying to catch the damn thing and save its life, it is spreading fish smells everywhere. So poor Chef Sue, who was sick of fish, had to descend into a cabin that smelt more like Billingsgate than Boutique.

So to the sailing. When looking at the tracker, we cannot as we have no internet but we have screenshots emailed to us, we are now pretty much the most southerly boat of the whole fleet. We are of course river sailors at heart so we tend to go for any tidal advantage we can get. We noticed on the chart that there is a “Northern Atlantic Equatorial Current” which apparently runs East to West at between 0.5 - 1.5 knots at around 16 degrees north. We have no details on the current other than it is going our way so our friends in Burnham-On-Crouch will be proud of us because, even though we are in the middle of the Atlantic, we are in the tide because we are at 16 degrees north!!!

First very tough decision of the day, do we shake a reef out of the main because the winds are light and we need some more firepower. Tough decision given our boom situation, which is certainly getting worse. In the end we went for it and experienced a true tradewind sailing day. Once the wind had filled in to a little under 20 knots, under a blue ski and the beautiful Atlantic swell, we flew west at 7.5 knots plus. This is what I came for, the true feeling of beauty and remoteness in what will likely be the best sailing conditions you will ever encounter offshore. We toyed with the idea of going with the cruising shoot also to get us really doing but to be honest, our trusted poled out jib has served us so well and we frankly wanted an easy time to enjoy the experience.

During the day JACK was joined by four beautiful creatures. We are not sure if these were bottle nosed dolphins or even sea cows but they were much larger than dolphins, with a flat head and hardly broke the surface of the water. But they cruised with us for a while and played around the front of the boat - truly magical.

You would have thought we would learn our lesson......... the wind had dropped by the evening so by virtue of sheer inertia and the desire to keep going we went into the night with the single reefed main and jib which was not poled out by this point. Chef Sue and Ben take the first watch and as night fell so did the wind and we were left going no speed with the waves making the main slap badly and putting more unnecessary pressure on the weakened boom. So all hands on deck and what do we do to make things more comfortable. In the end it was agreed the jib be rolled in, we put the second reef back in the main (thank goodness breathed certain of the crew), not without finding ourselves putting pressure on the weak side at one point, and we drifted quietly through the first half of the night under a heavily reefed main. Since then the wind has picked up and with more north in it so the jib is now set also and we are once again moving at 7.5 knots towards St Lucia. But now every mile we make will be effectively a mile closer to land.

An obvious question to us is why do we find ourselves the most southerly boat and really “Billy No Mates” of the fleet and, to boot, sailing more miles than those that are north of us? It could be argued we need to be sectioned or we have some form of sadistic tendencies or is it just my plot to extend my holiday from work (only joking Barry). In our early blogs we shared our theories, routing and reasons, the fact that we have managed to average over 7 knots for 1,450 miles in a 25 tonne warship we hope justifies our decisions. We have experienced good breeze and good sailing. As it transpires so, it looks like, has the rest of the fleet but you can only work with the information you have got at the time. The weather for us looks pretty consistent over the next few days which is what we were trying to guarantee, the further north you go the lighter the winds and light winds are not our forte. So we are on our own but in good breeze, it is lonely and in the back of your mind you think “What If”, especially with damaged spars, but the longer we travel the more we converge with the rest of the fleet. The question is, with our shortened sail plan, can we get JACK going well enough to pull a few places back.

We will try but we would prefer to cross the finish line, in 10 or so days we hope, with a full rig rather than a jury rig.

Halfway celebrations for us today for achieving this milestone. we are hoping for a repeat of yesterday in terms of speed and routing and we have the tide with us!!

Bye for now

Nick (Chief Whip of the Independent State of JACK)