Compared to the last two legs, this leg is much less hectic in many ways: manouvers (and therefore disturbed off-watches), conditions (less physical, less extreme), climate (warmer, drier.) This has given us the opportunity to get a bit more rest in our off watches and, believe me, we need it. I feel like the last 7 months of racing is taking it's toll on my body and I am trying to play catch-up in order to be able to do my job properly. I was planning to write this blog about ten days ago and just have not found a single minute to spare. This racing is a crazy life!
As this leg progresses I get the feeling that we are learning and improving more than ever, both in the way we work together as a team and also in our technical performance (boat speed, strategy etc), just in my last watch this morning we were discussing how we wished we knew everything we knew now and how differently we would have sailed in legs one and two if we were to go back and do them now… but also in more short term we are still astounded at how much we have learnt in just the last four days. I can feel a different vibe in our crew, more confident, more relaxed, in tune with the boat and each other. It is amazing how much we are changing.
We have sailed nearly 5000 miles, we spent the first week in the lead group, and now the leaders are only 50 miles away. Frustrating as it is to loose some miles in the last week we do recognise that this is our best leg yet… With more than 1000 miles to go we know that there are still opportunities and we also know that we are sailing better than ever, this is a crew with a mission.
Sometimes learning by our mistakes can be frustrating, we need to be careful to learn from them but not dwell on them…. I have put a little message up in the nav station that has forbidden "hindsight", "negative thoughts", and "pessimism" from the little area around the chart table… we need all the energy we've got to go forward and catch the others and I reckoned that sometimes frustration is a waste of time. The message is still here in front of me, someone (with a sense of humor and a red pen) has helpfully added "farting" to the list. In fact, I need to trace who has a red pen because the last time someone drew a moustache on my face (leg 5) when I was asleep (with a indelible marker) it was a red pen too…. there is a link there to find the culprit…….
So, yes, despite the intensity of our task, and our motivation to perform, we do keep a sense of humour on board. The latest is to try to beat the frustrations of our Sargasso "clingons" that have been killing us for the last 4 days… no matter what we do, there is always more and more weed wrapping itself around our keel, rudders and propeller saildrive. We look for it with an endoscope through a special hole in the hull to check how much there is to evaluate when to do our "capsize drill" to remove the weed and the best way of describing it is in "Peppa Pigs" - i.e. "we've got 2 Peppa Pig size clumps on the keel and a Peppa Pig on the saildrive" (this amount is enough to justify slowing down to remove it.) (sometimes this is followed by "and half the Amazon on the rudder" when there are just too many Peppas to be able to have a proper reference.) Any outsider hearing this would think we are going mad, but our newest crew member (female of course) is a small soft toy "Peppa Pig", hence to us this reference for size (neither metric nor imperial) makes total sense to us all. Maybe we are going slightly mad????
Sam
From Team SCA
