Down Down South We Go

We have been at sea for 6 days now, the longest I stayed on a sailing boat non stop. The weather has been mild with most days running under spinnaker in 8-15 knots of winds. Apart for a squall last night where we went from 0 to 40 knots winds in the space of 10 minutes, the going has been pretty gentle. It is sometimes frustrating as we are not only racing but also trying to make good speed toward Uruguay. That is the essence of sailing though: either too much or too little wind…

Temperature has been steadily increasing and now our base temp inside is 30 degree C. A bit more in the sail locker, a bit less at the bottom of the stairs. What is painful if the accompanying humidity level: everything is damp and as soon as we do some effort we become drenched in sweat. Today, I changed all my clothes so for a little while I am enjoying the luxury of a dry body in dry clothes. Until the next effort that is!

We passed by the Canary Islands which were by our side for the last 24 hours. There was a rush of excitement among the Europeans to try to catch some connection on their phone. Even one of us tried to have a call (unsuccessfully though). I did not manage to get a signal and I continue to rely on this mail service to update you.

In my role as vicutaler, I have to ensure that our freezer and cooler work well. These two are worrying me a fair bit: for whatever reason, the boat designer thought it was a grand idea to locate the freezer is in the same place that the water maker, in the forward starboard compartment with absolutely zero natural air flow: guess what, in this sauna the poor freezer cannot cope with all this generated heat and therefore cannot keep the -18c we need. We installed an entire ducting and fan-assisted forced ventilation so we do not loose all our meat and frozen stuffs and we have stabilised at -9 and -15 our freezer compartments. We have another trick up our sleeves that hopefully will allow us to go back to our healthy -18c. But with the tropical latitudes ahead of us, I am quite worried. As the freezer is used to freeze the water that keeps our cooler cool, a failure of one lead to a failure of the other one.

The good news is that as a result, we are eating large portions of meat to ensure we make enough room in the freezer to generate more ice packs. Yesterday night we had a Dahl with lots of pork and then an apple crumble. This was just before we went on watch and this super rich meal put us all in such a sleepy state that we felt that our watch will never end. I even fell asleep while trimming the asymmetric spi!

On another note, we are becoming much better at manoeuvres as a team. All of us are starting to built the instincts telling us what to do, what to check without having to logically think about it. That makes our life much easier and much less exhausting as well ( everything goes faster so we expand much less energy in anything we do). For example preparing the api once we take it down for relaunch used to be a multi hour undertaking. No more we now do it in half an hour. That is really encouraging.

On a personal note, a couple of days ago, I had a tough time: I became tense and snappy. It came about after I lost my earring while working in the sail locker which really annoyed me. I think this was just a trigger and that fundamentally it arose because we all live in such a confined space and I had not carved out me-time to recharge mentally. That added to the permanent humidity and heat on top of the physical toll of the past 2 weeks and here I was: ready to bite whoever came close! I did a long yoga session followed by some meditation alone on the foredeck, read a book, and surprise, surprise, I felt much better. I am all good now and back to a happy sailing self. It came as a surprise though how fast I was becoming a rabid dog! I now understand the stories I heard of hellish races with crew not talking to each other for weeks. I am learning a lot about managing this and clearly it starts by recognising it and accepting it.

As I mentioned I have never sailed so far or more to the point so long. It is a strange feeling to go watch after watch down south like this. The past six days came and went and they tend to get all bundled up together. Last morning someone reminded me of a manoeuvre we did the evening before and I was so surprised about this: I was sure it had been a few days back. I guess the watch system does this, as in effect we go to bed 2 to 3 times a day!

Race wise, we decided to go inside the Canary. We will see what comes out of it: with these winds not following forecast and remaining pretty mild, there is a lot of guess and luck involved and honestly we do not sweat too much about it. We do our best to choose a good route, we do our best to trim and steer well, and then whatever happens, happens.

Take care all