Jack Rowland Smith - Log Day 12 - JACK Rowland Smith - Portland Bill or North Atlantic?

Watch - Eat - chat (normally about nothing) - sleep - repeat. The life of a long distance sailor summed up in four simple words but alas, if it was that simple......

Day 12 and we have less than 1,000 miles to go. In fact, as I write this, we have nearer 900 miles to go so 2,000 miles sailed and now it really does not matter whether you have a trained or an untrained eye, we have definitely got more of the Atlantic behind us than in front of us. The thought did cross my mind yesterday as to the range of a helicopter, the closer we get to land the more likelihood of being saved should something bad happen. A Pretty negative thought I know but I bet I am not the only person who is concerned that our vast expanse of equipment does not include medical niceties such as a defibulator. Rather worryingly I can imagine the skipper designing one as we speak....

Talking of bad (or good in equal measure), I am pretty sure I saw a whale yesterday. Thankfully some way from the boat but I saw water spurts and a big tail and it was no dolphin....... Skipper went mad, running around shouting “here whaliie whalie” and making funny clicking noises, the rest of us looked on in bemusement being conscious of the news we received the previous night and so were a lot more subdued.

So moving back to the daily “grind”, to add to our trials and tribulations we have the niceties of navigation, boat “restoration”, boat maintenance etc etc. To be honest the navigation part is relatively straight forward for us East Coast sailors. Let’s be frank, if you can navigate from Burnham-on-Crouch to Harwich missing all the sandbanks, wind farms, chavs and everything else in between then the Atlantic is a doddle (albeit we do have to find St Lucia yet!). So for us it has been as much about weather routing and reading the weather charts than anything else. This activity is always great fun because it is like being in a room full of actuaries, there is a big range and no one agrees (I could add that they also change regularly but my actuarial colleagues would not like me for saying that:-) ). So whilst not as challenging in one way, the weather routing adds another dimension. As regards to my confidence that we will find St Lucia, pretty confident as long as satellites remain in the sky and Skipper’s sextant stays in the box. If Skip wakes up all “Christopher Columbus” on us then all bets are off!!

Boat restoration and maintenance comes in two forms, fixing and just keeping everything running. The boat was fully prepared for this trip, Skipper and First Mate (alias Chef Sue) have spent six months preparing and so far, touching every bit of wood we can find and my fingers crossed, we are in good shape with the exception of some self inflicted wounds. However the maintenance part is never ending, we have to run the 3 KW generator four times a day for well in excess of one hour to keep the batteries topped up. We have two fridges, autopilot, radar, lights at night, TVs, videos (worse in the 20.00 - 24.00 watch!!), water maker (I would say hair straighteners but for all those who have seen Chef Sue’s hair.......) and the list goes on. And then there is the water generation requirements. Discussed in previous logs is the league table of daily water usage but to this you have to add washing up, cleaning the deck of fish remnants (obviously a somewhat infrequent use) and we are using the water maker two hours each day to generate 250 litres of water!!! By the way, I did ask Skipper how the “prototype” water maker worked, I will never make an engineer and I cannot admit to understanding even half of what I was told but what I will say is that so far it has worked faultlessly (kiss of death now I bet).

And so to yesterday and what to report, well the word “repeat” springs to mind because it was light and uneventful. We did gybe lwhich gave us some time to “end to end” the jib pole so we now have the good end at the mast and we have rigged the broken end to attach to the sail. Very little else to do except sail as best we could but my, it is warming up. We are 15 degrees north now so getting closer to the equator and the sun is hot and the water is hot too; any form of effort results in a requirement for a shower which, of course, we cannot have. If it were just blokes on board then I suspect the boat would smell like the changing rooms of your local rugby club on a Sunday lunchtime, thankfully the ladies bring some decorum to the whole proceedings.

A worrying turn of events however, the Skipper has discovered a new game that keeps him amused into the evening called “lamping”. Not to be confused with any other probable forms of lamping, and I am sure there may be some, this “sport” involves shining a high intensity light at the sea and watching all the flying fish get attracted to it. Quite what the fun is of seeing these nutty smelly animals fly at you in the dark escapes me, and frankly the rest of the crew, but it keeps him chuckling for hours (for those who know the Skipper you will know what I mean). No lights on my watch as I hate damn flying fish, especially when they land in the cockpit. The only way to catch them before they disappear off into an open cabin hatch (and of course to try and save their lives) is to put the deck lights on, at which point you inadvertently cause your own form of “lamping” and get bombarded from all sides. It becomes more like being bulling in class at school with flying fish as the missiles rather than any form of offshore sailing.

And as for the ride yesterday and overnight, anybody who was in our part of the ocean for the last 12 hours, and that will probably be us only because we are on our own, will have experienced a sea more akin to that experienced in the Portland Bill overfalls than 1,000 miles offshore. The sea was completely confused with waves coming from all angles, if I did not know better I would say it was currents meeting but my belief that there is a current is waning . To prove the point the salon table uprooted itself from the floor and was flung across the cabin at 5.00am this morning. No easy rolling Atlantic swell for us, a very tired crew who have had very little sleep except strangely me who got three hours in total which is the most of the trip to feel good this morning. We also have some very dead flying fish on the deck, not because of the lamping sessions I hasten to add, but because the waves deposited them there (and the skipper thought the decks would stay dry....!!!).

And so to routing, well I am afraid a repeat of the previous day but with less wind was what we got yesterday, As an aside for all the bad routing the previous day and my frustrations we came out fine because we averaged 7.3 knots for the ARC noon to noon averages. This 24 hours did not look to be so good until the arrival of a front just before dark, since then we have been averaging pretty high speeds in very confused seas so we will see.

The wind is going light after lunchtime today for the next 48 hours and we will just have to see how we go in it. Two things we have not used since the first 24 hours of the adventure are the cruising chute and the motor. The former may come in to play if we cannot get enough speed through the water with poled jib and main (which will certainly have to have one reef in it) but we have decided that if the speed drops below 4 knots then the motor is going on. At the end of the day our goal is to cross the Atlantic in a relatively small boat and we are not proud, we will sail as much as we can but we have rum punches to drink and flights to catch!!!

Goodbye from a tired crew of JACK

Nick (no longer completely sleep deprived)