Story - 200 miles to go

Kalandia Web Diary
Bill Peach
Mon 7 Dec 2009 13:51
It was my birthday on the 4th which was duly recognised by the team with decorations, cake and a card wrapped up with a  nice steak meal. if you look carefully at the picture of the home baked cake you will see it represents the sea by its shape
 
Final preparations for arrival in St Lucia are now underway with under 200 miles to go.
 
We estimate that unless anything major happens we will arrive this early afternoon tomorrow (universal time). Whilst at sea we have been running on universal time (UT) or GMT, as all the navigation publication use UT. this means that as we go further  west the sunrise gets later, today it was 1030 UT. The local time is 4 hours later IE we will arrive local time early morning, which is all very confusing. So we will probably suffer from jet lag, not from the boat speed but he time difference and the fact that we have not had much unbroken sleep for 2 weeks!
 
The crew roles have fallen into place over the 2 weeks everyone taking a full watchkeeping role with 3 hours on watch and 9 hours off, which sound luxurious, but is rarely anything like that with meals and other jobs getting in the way.
Additionally Liz was comminications officer (as she has the long range radio certificate) as well as medical officer, which forunately only resulted in minor cuts.
Dick was quartermaster in charge of provisioning, documenting the ample stores in varous spreadsheets so we knew where everything was located and what we were having each day. Of course each day we caught fresh fish the system was thrown into array!
Richard was tactician, although to be fair most decisions were actively discussed amongst us all
I was the general dogsbody, not doing very much at all, but carried the weighty title of skipper
The boat has been run fairly democratically, and everything has always been decided with common sense and good humour.
As we now approach St Lucia, all the boats start to converge to the same point so there will be more going on as we reach  the finishing line, roll on the finishing line!!!
Bill
 

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