Watches
Ninaofsouthampton
Tue 27 Nov 2018 21:10
| Now that we are over 48 hours in I can only assume that our readership has fallen from a solid amount of initial interest (I’m not committing myself to numbers) to close family and those people trying their best to avoid doing any work on a Wednesday morning. I’ll take what we can get. As you are clearly a keen reader, I thought it would be a good moment to outline a bit how our daily life looks like on the boat. Yes you read that right; I told you I would run out of material quickly. In order to sail 24/7 we always need someone on ‘watch’, i.e. someone half awake to vaguely try and prevent us crashing into other boats* and to generally try and keep us afloat. The watches work as follows: first hour you are ‘lead watch’, you are responsible for the boat and you are ably assisted by someone else; the second hour you are all on your own, something that can be pretty magical in the middle of the night with the ocean bathed in the moonlight, or when the sun starts coming up, burning through the clouds (trying to be more artistic with my vocabulary), both of which I have enjoyed on my watches; the third and last hour you are assistant to the new watch leader, this comes with some really exciting tasks (cleaning, boat check, not as exciting as yesterday I’m afraid, serving drinks and generally pandering to the lead watch’s needs). And so it goes on, all day all night, every day every night, for approximately 63 watch cycles. Fun eh? Today there was great excitement as we had a watch change. Meaning rather than the hours of 10pm to 1 am being mine, my alarm will go off at the pleasant time of 2 am. Have I convinced you to do an Atlantic crossing yet? And yes, this was one of the stand-out events of the day. The other was the arrival of eight other boats around us this afternoon. Which, in a crossing of approximately 2,700 miles, was unexpected! If you’d like to read about the exact specifications of each yacht (I know I do) you can read Skip’s post. As you may have guessed by now, our insistence that we don’t care about racing (although being the highly competitive person that I am I never bothered to try and hide it) is utter bull***. It will therefore be relatively depressing to see them all zoom past us overnight. I would say that you should definitely come back tomorrow as the post will be far more interesting but I don’t like to lie to my close family. Until next time. *this comment is definitely not based off getting rather close to a boat last night I assure you. |