
The Race Committee have arrived safely on St Helena. What a landing, the island has such an awesome feel. Everyone is just so friendly and welcoming.
Mwera
Checking in, All is well on the blue and the heat is relentless, the one thing we are missing onboard is fans. Hiding and shading from the sun as much as possible. We are paying close attention to ail trim in these light conditions and occupying our time with cooking and boat organisation, which never ends.
One Eighty Magnus
From SV Magnus, a beautiful day out on the Atlantic. All is well on board Magnus. Light winds all around with lots of shifts. Less than 700 nm to the island. Fair winds to each and all. From the Magnus crew
Umoya
Instruments have been fixed. Beautiful champagne sailing today. Please ensure the island has buckets of ice cold beers from the 8th 🙂
Magic Dragon
Doom and gloom has descended! The realisation that 8 knots of wind seems to be the norm is hurting morale. However, Jane and Peter have played chess and put out fishing lures this morning. The daily “teddy dancing” competition was won by Vera with eight out of ten for her twin sheep Berber and BarBar. Peter has done his daily wind dance on the bow – so we’re hoping and expecting a decent sailing breeze shortly. I’m thinking of hanging out our storm jib and all our sheets in any spaces between our sails like Bernard Moitessier in “The Long Way Round” – anything for better speed!
Atalanta
After 2 days of variable and challenging sailing conditions,neading to beat over the top of the frontal low pressure system and doing all we can do keep up with or improve on Flica’s leading position, today we are finally in the “champagne” sailing conditions which this race is normally known for. It seems like we have entered the traditional downwind conditions associated with the trade winds, and with our spinnaker pole and S2 sail are making the most of it today.
The morning started with slow conditions and flapping sails our whole crew had a proper shower and we gave Atalanta a thorough clean-up as well, removing the little octopus which had washed up on the deck in the last few days. Looking at Mike “the Jesus” Robb kneeling on the stern and removing the dreadlocks from his hair after the last week of working the bow, getting drenched a few times and generally much reduced opportunity for grooming that flowing beard, Gerry and Heye were seriously thinking that a castaway had washed up on the stern of the boat. He is looking much better now, standing in the cockpit and trimming the spinnaker for us, getting the boat to a very pleasing +9knots heading straight for the island.
Our initial gourmet diet of pre-cooked Blue Cafe meals ran out a few days ago and we are now on a much more mundane Chinese noodles, energy bars, astro food spiced up with some Nandos sauce. We are running a dry boat and the thirst for that first ice cold St Helena beer is building day by day!! Vibes on the boat are great with the 80’s music playlist having run on repeat for 3 times already. When we cross the 20th degree of latitude we plan to drink that beauty of a Great Constantia rose which the sailing committee kindly included in the racing pack – it is the only drop of alcohol we have on the boat and will have to make up for the more traditional bottles of rum wo keep the crew in good spirits.
In terms of wildlife sightings, other than that Russian fishing trawler on a collision course in the middle of a very windy and wavy 2nd night, we have so far seen a turtle, a whale, lots of flying fish (one actually hit Heye on the shoulder sitting in the boat), one castaway on our own boat and otherwise mostly deep blue seas.
TinTin
Yesterday afternoon was slow, hot and frustrating but by early evening the trades had begun to fill in again.
Just before sunset we saw a very large pod of dolphins in the distance. Perhaps 100 individuals.
And just after sunset we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. So now it is officially hot day and night.
Being in the tropics we were greeted by our first rain squall this morning. It looked pretty bleak on our port side, but just skimmed past us, raising the wind speed from 15 up to 23 knots for a while. We had a few drops of drizzle. Not much.
Behind the squall we sat for a couple of hours with not a breath of wind. Dropped the spinnaker once again to prevent it from flogging itself to pieces, but as I write this we are again up to speed with a nice breeze and sunshine.
Water depth here is in excess of 5 500m. One if the deepest parts of the South Atlantic.
Surprisingly little sea life today. Some Flyingfish around, but none on deck. The only bird today has been a Storm-petrel
Fryd
Day 7 at sea towards the illusive island of St. Helena.
Unfortunately another day with another zero regarding our fishing adventure…, but more on that later.
On this trip with a small crew of only three, and with our apprentice Lars with limited sailing experience, we early on decided to sail conservatively the whole way to St. Helena. This means that we try to avoid any tricky maneuvers in the dark, such as for example gybing the big spinnaker in the nightly wind shifts.
Also, considering, that race rating officer Paul’s British ancestors possible were invaded and beaten up by Scandinavian Vikings some 1000 years ago, and that modern Paul is now taking his “blood” revenge by assigning a very high rating number to our Viking yacht Fryd. A number more appropriate to a modern Volvo Ocean Racer, than that of a 10-year-old Swedish build, heavily loaded performance cruiser that Fryd really is, performing according to our given rating number is probably a feat that only Paul himself would pull off!
Anyway, as we were about to gybe our big spinnaker at daylight 0500 this morning, a minute short of the gybe, our big orange kite decided to twist itself up in a solid knot. Eventually we sorted things out and doing this in daylight was indeed much easier than having had to do this in complete darkness.
However, let’s move on to our overriding problem. The lack of fishing success.
To underline the serosity of our situation running out fresh proteins and “god forbid” having to eat canned food, I called a morning meeting with my two south African crew, showing them a box of Swedish canned fish balls that we will have to eat unless we now catch a fish.
The canned fish origins from the same food producer as the Swedish pea soup that caused my two South African crew’s faces turning green and plaguing them with a 36-hour long nausea early in the race. (as a Scandinavian, we are not familiar with the word sea sickness, so I certainly attribute their sickness to their lack of appreciating Swedish food).
Anyway, the threat seems to have had an effect, as Andrew is now trolling pretty much everything we have on board, that even looks like a hook behind the boat…
His favourite lure is a pink plastic squid wrapped in plastic stripes with the Union Jack colours.
Should that lure catch a fish, then I doubt that, that fish is even edible…
Well, that’s is all the excitement we have on Fryd right now.
Cheers
Jarl on Fryd
Flica
We have had a delightful few days sailing in lighter breezes and a settled sea. The cloud cover the last few nights was not as dense and so we got to see some stars and a sickle moon, which has made the night watches much more pleasant. Wind very light today.
All is well on board and we are now well settled in to the rhythm of life at sea. We are all catching on sleep and feeling much revived and less grumpy as a result. We have around 530 nautical miles to the finish, so we expect to finish on Wednesday the 7th December If the weather plays along . Looking forward to a few cold beers and a hot shower on arrival!