Race 11 - Day 23
Crew Diary - Keep on trucking
22 May

What a great start to the day. Woken for breakfast and told we were heading for a squall. No irony here, this was indeed very welcome as it would cool down the below-deck sauna and cancel out the fierce sun that usually blisters down onto the deck. This turned out to be no ordinary twenty minute rainfall. This thing had rain stotting (a Geordie word) down onto and bouncing off the decks like mad for at least a couple of hours. It also had the amazing ability to remould the sea, smoothing off all the sharp edges of the waves and creating an eerie mini sand dune effect. It was definitely one of the highlights of the past few days where we are in race blight as we pass through possible retrospective finish lines and keep on trucking to the next in an air of uncertainty, not only of where the race might have or will finish, but also of how we’ll reach Panama in time for the stopover and transit, as the on-off nature of the wind is not clocking up sufficient direct miles (technically ‘velocity made good’) to mop up the outstanding distance. But, no worries, as like all things it will be fine.

Of course there’ve been other highlights to counterbalance the unreliable and frustrating sailing. We’ve had a total eclipse of the moon, which was made much more exciting as no-one was expecting it! We’ve been in the special latitude zone near the equator where both the North Star and the Southern Cross can be seen in the same sky. Turtles float by almost constantly. We’ve had a very close-up sighting of two large orcas swimming by with their calf protected between them, and mega dolphin days, too numerous to mention. A fantastic feeding frenzy that had dozens and dozens of them leaping two to three metres into the air before crashing back into the sea with an almighty splash, and then another amazing spectacle is when they swim alongside the boat at night, disturbing the bioluminescence from below to create an undulating torpedo-like streak through the water.

That’s it, until after transiting the Panama Canal to take us from the Pacific to the Atlantic and onto Bermuda, our next stop.

JD