99 Red balloons (or 1 red fender)
Purple Mist
Skipper: Kate Cope
Thu 20 Jun 2019 05:15
Wednesday was the day for wildlife, which was a good job as there was mostly very little wind so it certainly wasn’t the day for sailing.
At the skippers briefing Kass had clarified that rowing the yachts was not allowed, as we have a keen rower in the fleet (Mark Slats, Ohpen Maverick). I’m glad she did that or I would have been fashioning oars from the spinnaker pole we were so slow.
So the wildlife total for the day was:
2 pods of dolphins performing some nice acrobatic leaps as they swam past. They didn’t swim with the boat but at least they were above water, unlike last night where they just zoomed around under boat making laughing squeaks.
About 1000 Portuguese man-o-war jellyfish. I’ve decided the best description for you is like a floating translucent Cornish pasty. Which reminds me I think I heard that we might be greeted with a Cornish pasty by the rib that meets us at the finish which would be very nice.
A little wildlife sanctuary hiding under a red fender. I saw this red object floating and as it was on the course I sailed quite close. I half thought about trying to scoop it out as I’ve a fishing net for ocean plastic recovery when not racing. However as I got close there was the flash of lots of small fish that were clearly using this red fender and it’s associated seaweed as a home. I recall a similar scene in BBC Blue Planet 2 as they is not much shelter in this vast ocean so I left it in place.
At about 6pm the wind thankfully filled in and Purple Mist started to stretch herself and move along. We overtook “Walk on by” but have just been overtaken by our friends on Exehibitionist.
Wind is moving slowly SW so we will be swoping to the S2 or A5 at some point which should further improve the boat speed.
Update: No sooner said than done, before I had chance to fire up the BGAN the wind moved another 10’ and the A5 Is deployed. Exehibitionist is now on the beam again.
