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| Flying visits! |
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| Written by Lin & Rachel at sea | |
| Saturday, 29 December 2007 | |
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Like London Buses – you don’t get any for a long time and then loads come at once. In this case we’re talking about visits to our boat in various ways!
For a while it was all quiet out here, no ships, support yachts or wildlife to speak of. However, the last 36 hours has brought us a flurry of activity. Yesterday morning during our shift change over, Lin spotted the ghostly presence of a sail in the distance and with much excitement got straight on the radio to see if it was coming to see us. It was support yacht Kilcullen. They gave us a bit of an update on the race and other crews and we found out that there are around 6 or 7 other boats in the area – funny how you never see any of them. We had a nice long chat with the crew of Kilcullen and again when they returned just minutes after leaving us to pass on a message from Tony at Race HQ regarding our power problems. Unfortunately there wasn’t anything new that could help our situation on this occasion. We had a pretty rough night last night with massive waves breaking over the deck and yet again, all we could do was steer throughout the night until it calmed down at around 4am. However, our second flying visitor at around 10.40pm who we have named Biggles, had us in fits of laughter. Rachel had just taken over the next shift and Lin was getting ready for a sleep when Rachel called out for Lin to come out. Rachel thinking something had worked loose and trying to work out what it was discovered Biggles the Flying Fish flapping around on the deck. Every time she tried to pick him up, he flipped around even more until he ended up in the foot well where Rachel could get hold of him and throw him back in the sea. All the time Lin is killing herself laughing and of no use to Rachel at all! It seems we have now hit Flying Fish territory as we’ve been spotting them all day. They’re just amazing too, we never knew how far they can actually fly – a good 20-30 meters. We’ve also just had a passing ship for the first time in about a week now. It came within just over a mile from us and we were unable to alert them of our presence by radio but they passed by without any worries to us. We had a message asking for more detail about day to day living on the boat so here goes. Blisters & Sores – These haven’t been as bad as we expected but they are still quite painful at times. Our hands have been great, we got blisters early on (remember Bertie?) but the Kakadu kangaroo skin gloves and the blister sticks given to us by Karon at New Wave have really stopped us having any problems. (See photo in gallery of the gloves after 4 weeks and imagine how bad our hands would be without them). Our bottoms have caused us a bit more of a problem. The sores are like nappy rash and are due to us having to sit on wet seats and in wet clothes most of the time and the boat rocking about so much with the choppy waves (girls remember how it feels when you ride a bicycle with a man’s saddle – well that’s the kind of pain you get – ouch). We’re treating this with a combination of Sudocrem, Baby Talc and Aloe Vera Gel and when the weather is warm and sunny enough we go naked to get some air to our botties! All in all, we feel we’re managing quite well though. Chart Plotting – Every morning around 9am, one of us will take a reading from the GPS and plot it on the chart (see photo in the gallery). We also take readings in the evening and these help to keep our morale up as we can see the movement West – most of the time! Cooking – this has been a bit testing at times and even got abandoned in favour of snacks last night. Basically we have a small Trangia stove and a whistling Ikea kettle (see photo in gallery). All the food is dehydrated and you just add the boiling water to the bag. This sounds like a very simple task but when you have massive waves throwing the boat around, it can be quite tricky keeping the kettle on the stove and getting the water into the bags without throwing it over you. After the juggling act that was Christmas dinner, we’re glad it was only that day we opted for a different style of cooking! Food - The food in general is nice and especially the Expedition Foods own meals. The puddings and breakfasts have been abandoned in favour of two main meals a day and lots of snacking as we’ve found them to be a bit too heavy on the stomach. We’re certainly not going hungry but we are losing a bit of weight – woohoo! Well that’s about it for now, we’ll be in touch again soon. Lots of love, Lin and Rachel Position:N 20.12.07.8W 028.56.08.8 |
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| Last Updated ( Saturday, 29 December 2007 ) |