Monday 5th December
Nowcrew
Mon 5 Dec 2005 14:14
In position 17.34N
53.46W
Dave
Twizzlefield.
Sunday morning
started early as most of the crew had a good nights kip (with the
exception of Tollers!) due to the boat being less keeled over. We were
sat on deck just after sun up eager to see how much progress we had made over
night. Tom started breakfast early and when the smell of bacon made it's way to
the aft cabin Tollers soon joined us as well. He was cursing Ron over and over
again for waking him up in the middle of the night just as he had managed to get
to sleep. It appears that Ron had looked at the shift rota from the previous
week and woken the wrong person to take over from him! It just had to be Tollers
to make matters worse!
The wind had been
steady all night, the big blue spinnaker had pushed us forward at a steady 7
knots and we were making good progress toward the finish
line.
The sun was soon out
with a clear blue sky again, we were in for a scorcher! The new bimini had been
a life saver and was allowing most of us to sit in the shade of the cockpit out
of the direct sun.
All morning Tollers
was pushing the skipper to try out his twizzle rig sails. This sail
configuration means you drop the main sail and have two fore sails both held out
by poles at 90 degrees to the mast. Tollers was adamant that this would give us
an extra knot of speed. So we set about the task of rigging this up, a 40 minute
sail change!
Well guess what
happened? instead of gaining an extra knot of boat speed we lost a knot of boat
speed!! It was not long before we were switching back to our trusted big blue
spinnaker. From now onwards that sail configuration will be changed from a
twizzle rig to a TWIZZLEFIELD rig for this crew!!
Lunch today was a
Bails version of chicken fajitas washed down with a glass of rose wine. Oh we
were eating well! As Dave went to church in the aft cabin everybody set about
reading books and sleeping on a sunny Sunday afternoon. This is what the
Cheetham Holidays brochure had sold us all on 12 months ago!
We had a little
scare early afternoon when Andy told Simon he may have to cut back on his 3
showers a day as the water maker had stopped working!! The engineering team set
to work trying to work out what had gone wrong and Simon soon let out a quiet
sigh of relief when Andy got it up and running again. In fact the entire crew
celebrated this by all having late afternoon showers before
sundown.
Sundowners today
were G&T's. Andy had put together his second update of the photo show on his
Mac as we all watched the shots from the last three days roll by to the backing
music. It's great to have a creative director for a skipper with the tools of
his trade on board.
After the slide show
Simon dished up Swedish meat balls in tomato sauce with spaghetti.
Sorry Duncan but I witnessed him making this without Mr Dolmeo's help and
it was delicious. One of the benefits of marrying into Swedish culture me
thinks!
We were all a little
disappointed when the race positions came in this evening. Although we thought
we had made good progress in the last 24 hours it appears we have dropped back a
little on some of our closest rivals. Still it has made us more determined to
fight back and put in a better performance in the next 24
hours.
We trimmed the sails
for the evening and the skipper dished out his instructions to the crews on
watch for the evening. Up the pace boys!
As we entered the
night Dave played guitar on the stern while Tom and Andy sang. Andy stared up to
the stars and wondered: "where did it all go wrong"? We we're in
heaven.
"Toms trades" were
here and we were lovin' it.
Nowcrew
out.