Thursday  Nov 17th ……   Still on passage to Barbados 14 15.18N 56 23.99W

Today’s blog by Keith

As the least experienced sailor here and the one least prepared for the journey, I thought I would give a non-sailor’s review of the trip so far.

Wildlife

Whilst I did not expect to see a whale or a shark I was surprised at the closeness of wildlife and the way in which some of it seems to befriend us on the journey. Our first encounter was with flying fish. These things fly out of the water and land again with a plop after gliding above the waves for up to 50m. The flying fish have been a feature of nearly every day of our voyage.

Our next discovery was luminescent plankton as we sailed overnight in the Cape Verde islands. As the boat moves through the water and disturbs it, the plankton lit up the water with little sparkles in the wash. We didn’t get a picture of this unsurprisingly – you need to experience it.

Every harbour we saw in the CVs seemed to have its own  turtle which pops out of the clear water from time to time and can be seen taking to the depths again after taking air. This is fascinating to see when at anchor.

Dolphins were our wildlife highlight of the trip. We reported the various sightings and the way in which they followed us. They seemed to want to play and often followed the bow of the ship and darted from side to side as if competing with the yacht. I came off watch (more about watches later) after one of these dolphin visits and lay in my bunk listening to them calling to each other (just like Skippy but less dramatic) just the other side of the hull.

Birds followed us out from the CVs and we quite expected them to disappear after around 200 miles. We still had them with us at over 1000 miles out but were not sure if this was normal or that they had followed us too far. We saw other birds on the way and the most dramatic was the sighting of a Frigate bird which found us and came down to a few hundred feet and then circled us for a few minutes before resuming its journey. These birds are large and take flying fish and also take fish from other birds of prey.

Boat Life

This yacht is large and luxurious. The accommodation is excellent compared with other yachts. When compared with home however things are very different. Our bunks are compact and this is a picture of the cabin that William and I are sharing. We didn’t bother to clear up.

The ‘lee cloth’ is to stop you falling out of bed when the boat is at an angle. Initially it seemed impossible to get any sleep with the boat bouncing about and changing direction, the noise of water passing by the hull and the wind noise. Then we started the watch system which is designed to make sure that the boat is manned consistently day and night. One person is responsible for lookout duty and keeping the sails trimmed. The watch is 4 hours long in the day and 3 hours at night. It rotates round the 4 crew with skipper as backup and man in charge if things go wrong. You therefore get sleep and time off watch but you do have to get up at crazy times to cover your watch. By the end of a few days of this I found I was getting the hang of it. Then the sail changing started. Whilst we kept the same sails for a long time, eventually with changing winds we needed to fly the spinnaker. This seemed always to take place in the middle of the night when most of us were catching up on sleep. The crew did at one point indicate its strong desire to the skipper to avoid further sail changes in the middle of the night. Thankfully the next night we all got our allocated portion of sleep and everyone was happy.

Cooking is fun. It is remarkable that we have prepared such dishes as stir fried pork, fish pie, beef stew, potato and mince curry, chilli con carne and more all from scratch on this cooker.

This is the angle it goes to in order to  avoid pouring your culinary creation all over your legs. You get used to the rocking and rolling whilst cooking and doing all the other things needed. The motion can however still catch you out and throw you from one side of the cabin to the other.

One domestic ‘personal’ issue we were warned about at the start of the trip was to monitor the colour of our urine. We are close to the equator and it is very hot night and day here. In order to establish if we are drinking enough we were told that we should examine the colour of our outpourings and adjust water intake accordingly. Dark yellow is  bad, straw colour is  good.  As a result we are all topping up multiple bottles of water and putting them in the fridge in order to have cold water to consume in vast qualities.

Ropes are many and varied. Commands like ‘ease the fore guy’ in my view would be better phrased ‘ let out the blue rope’. Sailors don’t simply call ropes, ropes they are called different names for each function. There are warps and springs for mooring. Lazy guy, fore guy,  sheets (no, not the name for a sail), halyards and many more. I am starting to get the idea now but I still grab the wrong one sometimes. Funnily having eschewed the name rope  the crew on this boat have to make up a collective name for rope and it is ‘strings’?!?

My apologies to proper sailors reading this blog. I am sure that the non-sailors may have gained an insight. My apologies also go to my fellow crew members and skipper who have patiently helped me to get up to speed with all the things there are to learn on a boat like this. They have helped to make the trip enjoyable, exciting, interesting and memorable.  I have had a great time aboard Serendipity despite my obvious lack of sailing expertise.

We are now in the middle of a squall avoidance process as we approach Barbados. A squall seems to be a large cloud with lots of water coming out of it and needs to be avoided so that we keep an even keel and avoid rough weather.  This is one we were trying to avoid today.

You will as a result see a wobbly line if you are following our track recently. We have just been becalmed and turned on the motor (this is of course cheating until you realise that we have very finite diesel supplies) in order to continue progress to where we will pick up some wind.

Next stop Barbados!