Wednesday 30th November
Nowcrew
Wed 30 Nov 2005 15:37
In position
21.09N 40.58W
Day 9. We
awoke to a beautiful sunshiny morning, the wind had been reasonable steady 15
knots over night and we'd kept up good boat speed. Ian won the "most miles
travelled on watch" competition with a total of 15 miles covered, however Ron
swore blind he was robbed of victory by the reading on the GPS, which changed
gave Ian 1 mile covered after 30 seconds of watch.
Just after
light we decided time was well overdue to put our watches back - we'd sailed
through 2 time zones without changing and now it wasn't getting light until well
past 9am.
We continued
with the washing and household chores throughout the
morning.
At about 11am
the fishing line started to spin out - the speed with at which it was going
indicated that we'd got a big'un. After about half an hour of fighting we
finally got the fish (another Dorada) to the edge of the deck - this was to be
our biggest yet.
Nicko swiped
at it with the bail hook but as we hauled it to the deck our prey made one last
bid to escape. It leaped from the water like a salmon and the impact was too
much for our 50lb line to take - snap it was gone. Our dorada was not going to
be today's lunch.
The rest of
the day was spent watching the distance to go clock wind it's way down to the
magical 1350 mile halfway mark.
A few of us
watched Whiskey Galore on the DVD while Ron made beautiful lush
green bow ties out of a Johnny Walker Green Label box for Simon, Tom and
himself.
During the
last couple of hours running up to "H" hour Tom and Dave performed another
matinee concert as we all sung along.
Then finally
just before 5pm (local) we hit the spot. Everyone rushed below and dressed for
the occasion, bow ties, wigs and head garlands. The beers were cracked open and
we enjoyed an hour of jokes and storytelling.
Simon nipped below
at about 7pm and rustled up what Dave described as his perfect meal: Argentinean
beef fillet steak seared on the outside, pink in the middle with roast potatoes,
garden peas, fresh baby carrots and a Bails peppercorn
sauce.
All washed down with
a Gran Reserva Rioja - mmm we were truly in culinary heaven
To cap that we we're
travelling at 9.5 knots on a beam reach and still eating in a civilised fashion
at the cockpit table.
Dave described it as
one on the best meals he'd ever had anywhere even better than Cafe Rouge's steak
frites, which we all know is Dave's "meal of choice".
To cap that Andy
nipped below and produced a huge bar of Galaxy chocolate that Babs had wrapped
up as a present to be opened at the finish line. The chocolate was broken into
chunks and seemed to vanish before our eyes. This was the only sweet we'd had
all trip - luxury!
As the night closed
in we all agreed this trip had been one of the best adventures of our
life's and hoped the second half was as enjoyable (but maybe not as eventful) as
the first.
As some people
checked in we found out that tropical storm Delta had hit the Canary Islands and
had caused considerable damage...we were lucky that day.
In the overnight
position email from World Cruising we found that we were still 4th in class. 72
miles behind La Royere, 61 miles behind Charliz and 7 miles behind Northwind. We
took a decision to head South of the rhumb line to avoid a hole, which seemed to
be appearing ahead and hopefully catch the tradewinds earlier than the 3 other
contenders and perhaps steal the edge over them. Otherwise we fear it may end up
in a procession to the finish.
The positions on the
ARC website are probably a little confusing for our readers. There are two
factors that may influence our end position
1. Handicap, each
boat is given a rating to ensure that everyone has a fair chance and that the
race is decided on the crew and boat's performance rather than the length of
boat (longer boats are faster than small ones).
2. Engine hours, in
the cruising class we are allowed to use our engine if we feel it necessary. We
are penalised for doing so however when you're going no where it's worth it.
Unfortunately engine hours are not computed until the individual boats hand them
in at the finish. Therefore until all the boats in our class have finished we
won't no the true results.
We think that the
boats up on the more Northerly route will have used a similar amount of hours to
us and that boats that chose the Southerly Cape Verde route will have used a lot
more. At the moment we've used 36 hours of engine (the average for the trip is
80 hours), however we've just sailed into a hole and have the engine on as we
speak.
Nowcrew
out.