Race 2 - Day 22
Crew Diary - Race 2, Day 22
07 October

Part I

Hello Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam Supporters!

You'll be happy to know my helming has improved considerably! I have it on good authority that we are still heading towards Uruguay, despite my best helming. The trick is to let the boat talk to you and tell you what to do. I'm sure a few of you are back to being concerned but the boat talking to you is a good thing (unless it speaks out loud, this is a different problem and you should think about speaking to someone yourself). It turns out the boat is pretty chatty and talks almost constantly about wind direction, wind strength and the size, frequency and power of waves, heck the boat never shuts up! I am learning the art of listening in on this constant stream of chatter and to react accordingly, which has done wonders for controlling the movement of the boat. Now all I have to do is learn to stay on course (Falklands, here we come!) and I will be pretty decent at the helm. Not half bad!

Now that you've breathed a sigh of relief I'll tell you about the wildlife we've seen while at sea. No sharks or plucky baby fish called Nemo, but every night we've watched the waves churn up bioluminescent plankton. Remember the scene from The Little Mermaid (song: Kiss de Girl) where Ariel and whatshisname are in the boat and the water seems to glow with underwater fireflies? Well, that is not just Disney's wild imagination, it's real, and as our boat cuts through the water, up splash waves of glowing glitter, some even splashes on board and glows for a second or two before going out. They look like tiny stars littering the water around us and the effect is incredible.

We've seen a good number of sea birds too, white and speckled seagulls on the hunt, a tiny swallow flying acrobatically around us, not one but two albatross, and a falcon which made our mast it's home for a day. I can't tell my peregrines from my Malteses so I couldn't tell you what kind of falcon it was, but it was nice to host a fierce bird of prey. We also had an incident with a small black bird who got caught in a squall, saw our ship below and flew down to seek shelter from the storm. Its first attempt to land and rest its weary wings was, unfortunately, on Ivan's head. Due to Ivan's, uh, hair 'style', it failed to find purchase and had to land elsewhere, finally spending the night on our starboard helm (equally hairless but less wriggly) before leaving after the sun rose and the weather had cleared.

And who could forget the many fish we've seen! I'll briefly catalogue these for you, these were:

(i) The Incredible Fish We Think We've Seen. These would be the whales, however, all we actually saw were a few spouts of water, so really could have been anything...

(ii) The Fish Only Mark Saw. He swears he saw tuna and even rigged up his own fishing gear with some yarn, a tiny fish hook and a can of spray deodorant. I don't know about the fish but if we are ever stranded at sea, I know Mark will be the one to save us.

(iii) The Fish We Only Saw Part Of. At one point, as we were lined up looking at something else entirely, three ominous-looking fins broke the water in sync then disappeared from view. They were too small to be whales, but not too small to be sharks. We held our breath.

(iv) The Fish We Can't Wait To See More Of (dolphins, yay!!) They're not technically fish but we've been chased by schools of them glimmering silvery white under moonlight and launching themselves into the air to look at us.

(v) and of course The Fish We've Seen Far, Far Too Much Of. Flying fish. I'll describe our encounters in Part II.