The First 24 hours!
Shalan
Mon 21 Nov 2016 15:37
Good Morning! So we've been going now for 23 hours. We had a pretty good start across the line with the code 0 and main and seemed to leave the rest of the pack behind us. After about 3 hours we dropped the Code 0 and went with the Spinnaker. We continued South with Graycious and Black Lion alongside us into the night. Annoyingly Black Lion seemed to have a bit more pace than us in the light winds!
At 23:53 we put in a gybe onto starboard tack and continued on course 246. It soon became evident we were then traversing the rest of the pack who were still on port tack. After failing to get the first boat on VHF for 15 minutes, we came within 200 meters and were about to gybe before they eventually saw us and gybed out the way getting their spinnaker in a wrap in the process. 20 minutes later we were trying to contact the next boat Lillith, who also were failing to acknowledge the VHF. We ended up deciding it was best to continue on port tack to avoid any further near collisons. Eventually we got hold of Lillith on the DSC who apologised for not picking up the VHF. A subsequent radio test with them confirmed there was nothing wrong with our communications, they just weren't listening! Continuing on we had the three Challenger boats infront of us and hunted them down into sunrise. The wind has dropped to 8 knots now so we need to make a decision whether to continue south or cut west. Decisions decisions!
Everyone on board is getting on great. Although after about 4 hours we realise we may have massively underprovisioned the snacks cupboard! How was 6 packs of pringles going to be enough for 2 weeks!! We've got the fishing lines out but no bites as of yet. Found a dead squid on the deck this morning so we're now using that as bait!
During our days in dry dock we treated the boat to a PS4 which has so far been a great companion. In our downtime we're slowly mastering NBA-17, although the controls and skills seemed so much easier when we first played in 1994.
Current rigging set up is under review. Starting to flog a bit now....may have to break open the Heinz baked beans for lunch.