Race 1 - Day 28
Crew Diary - Race 1 Day 28: Liverpool to Punta del Este
17 September
Today's broadcast hears the return of the Voice of the Victualler. To be frank he wasn't too chuffed to head below to the laptop, because he's had a glorious few hours on deck under blue skies and fair winds, trimming the spinnaker and helming with a (very short lived) PB of 16 knots. Anyway, our audience awaits and cannot be denied their daily insights into life aboard Garmin...
Day 28 and no signs of food poisoning, scurvy or malnutrition. The mid-leg early warning to “take it easy on the butter” seems to have paid off, and we are still able to enjoy decent toast for breakfast, particularly this morning with Maureen's excellent loaves from her chef duties yesterday. It's unlikely we will make it to Uruguay with honey, but the only notable failing is that we are out of muesli and granola so the only cereal option is Weetabix (on non-porridge days). Weetabix is a victualler's joy from a budgetary perspective but has no other commendable properties – is it actually foodstuff or a building material?
Percy our leg of Serrano ham was dismembered a week or so back by a hungry skipper with sharp knife. He is now in chunks in the fridge (Percy, not the skipper) and provides a meaty augmentation to our otherwise hipster diet, including today's butternut squash soup by Rowena and Bill.
As you will have heard in previous posts, we recently had a solid week of life at 40 degrees which made things tricky for the chef's du jour. For the Victualler who got lucky on the rota, there was some sense of guilt at the hoops and jumps he had laid down for them in the meal plan during these trickier conditions. But normal service has been resumed and we are a seeing a return to off-piste experimentation, with Bill on the hunt for excess powedered milk and gingernut biscuits in order to serve up a cheesecake. Tune in to tomorrow's exciting installment to see how she got on.
Finally a belated thanks to my friends Mary and Alan for the Cook's Measure they gave me in Gosport. It has been used every day in the galley. For any entrepreneurs out there however, I have spotted a niche market for a Sailor's Cook's Measure which has the metric scales printed in any colour other than red, so when making up milk on the night watch under the red cabin lights (to preserve night vision), one can read the scale. Just a thought, don't expect to get rich, I demand no royalties.
Toodle pip. Must head back on deck now for the second half of the watch.