And we’re off!

Ninaofsouthampton
Mon 26 Nov 2018 06:06
And so it begins! Two thousand seven hundred nautical miles, three (ish) weeks, four men and one forty-five foot yacht. Assuming that you haven’t managed to navigate through a website that seems to have been set up around 2005 accidentally, thank you for tuning in! If you have any complaints/feedback on our content, frequency of updates or general ideas for improvement, you can’t tell us as we have no internet*.

Firstly, for anyone following our track, we are aware that we are not heading in a straight line to St Lucia. This is the plan to get more wind that should be obvious to any capable sailor (I was told five minutes ago ...). Second, for anyone wondering why we aren’t in front; the ARC organisers assign each boat a handicap rating based on what is fair. This is far to complicated to explain so you’ll just have to trust me, we’re winning. 

We have made it over 100 nautical miles south of Gran Canaria after the smoothest of starts. It was a brilliant send off, with the sun shining, a band playing, locals waving and spectator boats doing their best to crash into us as 150 boats headed for the start line.

As we started to leave Gran Canaria behind us, we scrambled to get the last vestiges of our internet including: five ‘final calls before we’re out of signal’; getting the last update on the football; and reminding ourselves the status of the Brexit deal (before we check back in in three weeks time when our new prime minister Boris Johnson is ordering regiments of fisherman to storm Calais in order to protect Gibraltar). Finally the deafening sound of my phone notifying me of all two likes on my Instagram post fell silent, and we were on our own. It was at this point that it hit me what I had really signed up for ... ohhh sh*t.

Finally, I should probably warn you that this is about as interesting as these posts are going to get; tomorrow there will be a large section on describing how the water is blue and a detailed narrative on what we eat ... I can barely wait ... . The overall target is to be less boring then any other blogs describing days and days of ‘we are still surrounded by water’, and hope that we have one follower left when we sail into Rodney Bay in St. Lucia.

*ok this is a slight stretch on the truth. It would be difficult to write a hilariously boring blog without internet; but it definitely sounds less impressive if you say ‘yes we’re completing off the grid ... apart from emails ... the occasional text ... oh yeah and we can take a call if we really want ...’