50:47.36N 001:7.17W

It was two thirty in the early hours of Friday morning when I finally met up with the crew of Adventure in a rainy Weymouth harbour.  All the crew were in good spirits though with the usual stories of various people throwing up in and around the boat.  After a couple of hours rest we set off for Portsmouth and having missed out on two days of training I was keen to get involved on the boat and to get to know the crew, especially the guys and girls on Red watch of which I was going to be watch leader!

However thirty minutes into the trip I started to feel that perhaps red watch had planned some kind of an initiation ceremony for me as I soon started to feel a little bit queasy!!  A couple of minutes later and I was face over the side of the boat ‘feeding the fish’ much to the amusement of the rest of my watch who had suffered the same fate the two days before.  Luckily for me my sea sickness managed to last me pretty much the whole day so my trips to the rear quarter of the boat became a pretty regular sight for the rest of my watch, one such trip came as a bit of a surprise to me and my oily jacket took the brunt of it much to the entertainment of the rest of the crew! 

That aside we had an excellent day sailing with 40 plus knots of wind and good size waves to match.  We took the evening shift up on deck which involved sailing the boat dead down wind around the southerly side of the Isle of Wight and through to Portsmouth before bringing the boat into Gosport harbour.  Although we started the day in the pouring rain the storm soon passed and the afternoon was clear, cold with 20 foot waves for the boat to surf down.  With the sun setting and the weather calming down due to the shelter of the island I soon started to feel back on form and having held down a packet of crisps and half a Snickers bar I felt on top of the world!  All the watch managed to learn a few things throughout the day through various sail changes, night time light and cardinal identification and finally to A-Z capitals game which took up a good 20 minutes!  All in all a good days training which we will build on tomorrow in preparation for Greenland in the summer.      

Rachel Nicklin