Story - 200 miles to go
Kalandia Web Diary
Bill Peach
Mon 7 Dec 2009 13:51
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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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