DAY 14 (Friday 27th Nov)

We are down to our last bottle of gas, which means that bread baking and tea making are now officially rationed. Tea is restricted to one cup each at breakfast, lunch and supper.

With this in mind, Colin and I took advantage of the skipper and the non-tea drinking Kitkat being asleep to enjoy an illicit brew up at dawn. We were due to renew hostilities with the crazy chute (‘the sail that just loves to stay in its bag’) this morning. But the wind gauge strongly suggested that we would be sticking with twin foresails until lunchtime at least. With 20-25 knots of wind (and, occasionally, a good deal more), the chute would be unstable – and that’s if we could get it up in the first place. In any case, the wind strength meant two genoas would zip Sinan along at a rare old lick.

And so it proved. In overcast conditions, we made 6.5 to 8+ knots quite comfortably for most of the day. The absence of the need for any sail work, save for the odd tug on a sheet here and there, came as a relief after the boot camp feel of the previous few days. We lazed around unashamedly as a result.

All was going well. We even caught Kitkat reading one of his A-level texts (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) rather than dipping into other people’s books or reading film scripts. At one point, Kit asked: 'Who was Garibaldi? - predictably unhelpful chorus of 'biscuit' followed - and later, he asked: 'What is Transfiguration? There's a nun in the story who is something of the Transfiguration.' This led to a conversation about miracles, God, and religion in general.  Every so often you remind yourself of the vastness of this ocean and the very small size of this boat.

At around teatime, the wind really did pick up and, while seeing the speedometer hit 10 knots now and then was fun, we probably had too much canvas out to be entirely safe. When Captain K received a severe weather warning, the decision to take down one of the genoas was made even easier.

The possibility of a storm in the night saw us agree to longer, two-man night watches. Captain K gave the safety briefing just before supper: life jackets and life lines to be worn at all times when on deck; let out the genoa sheet pronto if the boat feels like it’s broaching. “But I refuse to be cowed by this weather,” he continued in cod Churchillian vein, “which is why I’m giving the order to break out the peach crumble for pudding!”

I accompanied Captain K on the 9pm to 2am watch. While the weather could have been better (I was bundled off the cockpit bench a couple of times), it was nothing to write home about (in, er, a blog for example).

The only moment of real interest, in what could be politely described as five hours of mind-numbing boredom, was when I heard a strange buzzing sound. At first I thought it might be the auto helm flipping to manual again, but our course remained true. Then I wondered whether it might be our eagle eyed skipper snoring on watch. But the pitch was far removed from the rich, elephantine bass tones we’d come to expect from Captain K.

Then, on the port side deck, I saw something that wasn’t a rope move. I groped for the torch and its ghostly beam revealed... another bloody flying fish. It was too far away for me to reach without unclipping my life line. Now, I may have been nicknamed ‘nature boy’ when I was a kid, but the idea of a tombstone marked: “Wynn Davies – he laid down his life so a flying fish might live” did not appeal. The trouble was the damned thing kept flipping and flapping, with each slap on the decking pricking my conscience.

Not wanting to break the skipper’s concentration (he’s a master of scanning the dim horizon through lowered eyelids), I came up with a rescue plan. Grabbing the downhaul line (“the blue one!”... “it looks green to me”... “shall we agree on turquoise?”... “just pull the bloody thing!”), I made a loop using the sort of rubbish bowline that can get a valued fellow crew member killed. After a couple of feeble attempts, I managed to snare the fish and drag it towards me. After taking great care to cause irreparable damage to only one of its fin-wings, I tossed it overboard. Once more, not a word of thanks.

In today’s production, Captain K was played by Timothy West. Robert Hardy has sacked his agent.

The storm never came...

RWD

www.justsgiving.com/atlanticoceansail