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Xenial - Day 14 - Xenial Standard Time



Today we passed the 24h onboard mark and the less than 2'000 nautical miles to go mark. They don't feel like huge milestones but we have to divide this journey into small digestible bits, so we always have something to celebrate and something to look forward to.

The first night onboard was rough for everyone. We were tired from departure day and still getting used to these big waves, very different from the sea we had between Las Palmas and Cape Verde. Hence we didn't get much shut eye, and a few of us have also started to feel somewhat seasick. On the bright side, the wind has been strong and steady, so we make a solid 8-10 knots most of the time. This means we haven't changed our rigging in the past 24h. Flying the main sail with two reefs and our standard foresail.
The low activity for the sailing committee and the trimming committee has resulted in most of us trying to catch up on sleep during the day. Some of us with the help of seasickness pills, which you can always count on making you drowsy.

We have been faced with the conundrum of which time zone we should be on. Between Las Palmas and Mindelo there was only 1h time difference, so as soon as we started we moved our watches to Xenial Standard Time (XST), which happened to coincide with Mindelo's time zone. Between Cape Verde and Grenada, the time difference is of 3 hours. So the captain moved XST back one hour during the first day, just to get us going. However we noticed that the move may have been somewhat premature. Sunset was around 5pm and sunrise around 5am. Doesn't make much sense when our night shifts are from 8pm to 8am, and we would like to have dinner around sunset (instead of in the pitch dark like the past two days). So the captain accepted our suggestion and we moved XST back to Cape Verde time, hoping for better use of daylight tomorrow. I find it really cool that we can make our own time, and it is absolutely arbitrary because we don't interact with anything from the outside world. Also, unlike da
ylight
savings changes that are usually made between 2 and 3am, ours happen in the middle of the day, otherwise they would mess up our carefully laid out night shift plan.

So with the sailing committee and the trimming committee taking a break, what did we get up to today? The spotting committee has been closely monitoring our progress vs other boats. It is funny how we all left from the same place and the same time and are heading to the same destination, and yet we can barely see any boats around us. It does seem that during the day we go as fast as our neighbors, but during the night we tend to do a bit better - we suspect that other crews reduce their sails for the night shift, and it makes complete sense given the number of family and two handed crews in the rally. How they do it we don't know! It feels like a challenge already with a team of 6 adults, imagine having kids on board to take care of, or being only two people sharing the entire workload. We are impressed!

Having sufficiently debated the positions of other boats, the spotting committee was alerted that a fly was spotted on board. You can only imagine the joy of the crew when they realized they could set up a hunting committee! These Swedes and their hunting! Techniques were discussed, there were plenty of hand clapping demonstrations, but to this hour the hunting committee has remained purely a theoretical committee, much like it's sister committee, the fishing committee.

Don't worry, we have plenty of proteins stored in our freezer, the provisioning and cooking team assumed we could catch 0 fish (or flies for this matter!). However we have had a bit of a disaster with our carrot supplies, the have gone mouldy and slimey very quickly. So I spent my morning peeling them and keeping what was salvageable, now stored in tupperware in the fridge after being immersed in water for a few hours. Janne delighted us this morning with freshly cut mango, pineapple and apples, which we ate rather quickly on deck. For dinner, we took some of the aforementioned frozen proteins, and Janne revived some of his amazing fish with coconut lemongrass and ginger sauce. The highlight however was Major Gustaf flying across the saloon when a wave caught him off guard while he was helping with dinner preparations. We have now nicknamed him Flying Gustaf, which somehow resulted in the Swedes telling me about a most peculiar dish, called a Flying Jacob. By the sound of it,
we
should be grateful that we decided not to include it our menu.

Over and out,
Mavi



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