28:07:66N 15:25:49W Some R and R in GC...........Thursday 18th November

Phoebe B
Sail Ionian
Thu 18 Nov 2010 16:11
Can't believe that we've been here almost a week - time has flown.
 
Weather has mostly been sunny and 25-28 C though last few days we've had a lot of cloud and a day's heavy rain. As Paul said, "Can't complain in November".Today it's a hot 30 C.
 
The week has been a mix of Happy Hours (often too long!), good food and ARC presentations. As a rule, mornings on board have been very quiet with everyone easing their way into each new day at their own pace - which has invariably been, how shall we say, "relaxed"!
 
The ARC presentations have been great and have been well chosen to help us all to prepare for the crossing. Topics have included Provisioning (everything from which fruit and veg to buy for keeping qualities, how to clean them to remove the bugs and how to avoid 150 bananas ripening at once; planning for running out of cooking gas; baking bread in a pressure-cooker, etc), First Aid (sea-sickness to broken bones and worse!) , Energy Efficiency (to save the batteries) and Weather (all about squalls and how to survive them). This morning we had a demo of a helicopter rescue from a boat, use of flares and then an opportunity to experience the joys of trying to get into a capsized liferaft in a heavy sea!
 
So, all in all, very useful.
 
On the less useful, but more enjoyable side, there was a fancy-dress party last night. We had an extremely creative and totally unique idea (which it seems only 3 or 4 other crews did too!). For the nautical readers, we went as the 4 Cardinals. For the non-nautical readers, we looked more like the 4 Idiots. We didn't win any prizes but did have a great time.
 
 
We have a new crew member on PhoebeB (Jonathan) and there are two new crew on Tranquillizer (Lee and Sam). No doubt Jonathan will be doing the PhoebeB blog and giving his view on the world over the next weeks.
 
 
Finally, for any of you who followed the link that I put in the last blog hoping it was correct for the Yellowbrick tracking, apologies - the naughty photos and articles for sale weren't exactly what I had intended! Seems the correct link is on the same page as this blog but won't be activated until we leave. (The blog map only gets updated only when we do it while the Yellowbrick is automatically updated every 4 hours).
 
That's all for now
 
Tony