It's been a very eventful couple of days on board. We have completed the Ocean Sprint, sometimes zooming along, sometimes wallowing about.
The weather has been very challenging, seemingly changing just after we change our sails. The wind has come from anywhere between west south and east and be anything from 0 to 50 kt. It's been sunny and heavily raining. I believe the weather people would classify this as a variable. Unfortunately, last night we were caught out by one of these changes as the wind increased while we were flying our Code 1 before we had the chance to get it down, it decided enough was enough and decapitated its self ( to be fair the wind had got up to 35kt at that point) the crew were great jumping into action and swarming over the foredeck, valiantly heaving the sail back in to the boat from the sea.
It's now snugly packed in its bag awaiting repair in Washington. As these things never come on their own about 12 hours later, and we are cruising along under another spinnaker when this time as sometimes happens, the tack blew. Taking this as a sign rather than following Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam’s lead and reattaching the tack with the spinnaker still flying we decided to drop the kite and continue along under white sails. Despite the mishaps energy and moral remains heigh with the galley continuing to produce wonders. Today for lunch, we had homemade pizza, a first for UNICEF.
Dan, Laura and a hard-working UNICEF