Race 11 - Day 20
Crew Diary - Race 11 Day 20
29 May
Qingdao, No. 1!
Departing from Seattle on May 3, after 20 days of sailing, at the second Finish Line at the southernmost point of Mexico, Qingdao crossed the line first and won the "Seattle-Panama" race.
It took less than a week to depart from Seattle, across Los Angeles, and enter Mexico. Currently, we have been sailing in Mexico for two weeks, and we are still some distance from Guatemala. In an era where we are used to arriving at our destination quickly, a one-day flight is almost You can reach most places on the earth, and now it feels like you have returned to the Age of Discovery. With the help of wind and currents, you can sail from one end of the ocean to the other, and it will take a month or more to reach the destination.
The past week has felt like I spent most of the time wandering around in a wind tunnel. When there is no wind at night, the sea level is sometimes as calm as a mirror. The deck is exposed to the sun and the cabin is stuffy. This reminds me of many plots in the movie Shawshank. Redemption, Interstellar, The Three-Body Problem, Life of Pi, The Pianist, and Jia Zhangke. A few days before the start of the Seattle game, when it was time to change shifts, everyone started dressing layer by layer, with warm and sweat-wicking base layers, a second layer of fleece, and then put on sailing clothes, sailing boots, and finally life jackets. Wear safety ropes, put on headlights, queue up from the cabin escalator to the deck, and hand over to the previous class. This scene reminds me of the miners going down the mine every time, and in The Shawshank Redemption, sitting on the roof after work and drinking. The "free man" drinking beer, calculated that we still have about a week before the beer.
During the night shift a few days ago, Musk's Starlink evaporated from the top of the sail. It was a very shocking scene. Dozens of huge bright spots lined up in a long straight line appeared at extremely fast speeds and then disappeared again. Before departure, I just finished watching Netflix's The Three-Body Problem, and this scene always makes me feel familiar. At night, the sky is often filled with stars. The familiar Big Dipper and the Milky Way are exactly the same as those I saw in my hometown when I was a child, but in an instant, I am thirty years old.
The creatures in the ocean, from the jellyfish we saw at first, to the squid that we had to pick up every night, and the occasional flying fish that flew onto the deck, and then to the gray whales that spewed huge water mist, there were swarms of them these days. Dolphins are accompanying Qingdao. In the afternoon the day before yesterday, I felt that there were dolphins jumping everywhere on the sea. Last night when I was sleeping on the deck, a group of dolphins made a "puff" breathing sound next to the ship. Right next to your ears, under the pouring moonlight, you can see the bodies swimming under the sea surface, and then they tumble out of the sea and draw a silver line.
In addition to seeing various creatures in the sea, guests were also welcomed on the deck. Various birds landed on the deck guardrail. At first, it was one bird, then two, and now there are probably dozens every day. The birds stayed there, not afraid of people at all, and refused to drive them away. Everyone was used to carrying buckets to wash the bird droppings on the deck every day when they went out to hunt.
After crossing the Finish Line, there is still a distance of more than a thousand nautical miles to reach Panama. It will take about a week to reach Costa Rica, then dock for refueling, then return to Panama to wait for other racing boats to arrive, and begin to enter the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific Ocean through the Panama Canal.
Foreman Wang's status has been changing, from "Have you seen jellyfish?" to "Have you seen squid?" to recently, "Have you seen fishes as big as sandbags?" He just looked out from the deck and said that another dolphin was coming. Brother Tian’s cooking skills are outstanding. Every time he cooks, he gets good reviews. Whenever he wants to make Mother Watch, he always asks, Xiaoshi, what do you want to eat? I will cook it for you. I said I didn’t want to eat canned beans and wanted to eat twice-cooked pork.