A proper hello family and friends from our Punta sailboat. All is well. First, apologies for disappearing and making you all nervous about where we are; we haven’t been sucked up by the Bermuda Triangle, that’s in a couple of days. We decided with the other skippers to play our Stealth Mode all together at the same time. I believe this is the first time that an event like this has happened and it shows how good friends we all are, above the competitiveness we have. We didn’t do it to wind our bosses up, of course not, they are good bosses; but we thought it could be fun to play it just before getting to the Caribbean Islands and then pum, evaporate! Now, you all are wondering which route we took, who is going to be ahead, behind, etc., and for this only time, makes you all think on our routing. It’s going to be a cool surprise when we pop up, but for now, good luck with that.
Today we had glorious fine reach conditions, sometimes tighter with our Windseeker and Yankee 1, followed by a short and intense wind hole with some gybe/tack manoeuvres. All very routinary. We saw cargo ships, a super yacht’s sails on the horizon, a deep blue lifeless Caribbean Sea and unfortunately a lot of garbage. It’s been heartbreaking to see all this rubbish floating in the sea, every time I sail the Caribbean I notice the same, but now it is worse. I wish no turtles live this side of the water as they would choke with all the bags we’ve seen. Seeing this makes me angry and at the same time wakes me up lots and makes me more aware of how the everyday things in my regular life impact the oceans. I ask you, readers of our blogs, if you can from now onwards quit 20% of the plastic you are using regularly, or if you can re-use stuff you take for granted; please! Believe me, I’m SURE you can! You won’t change the world, yes, I know that, but you’ll contribute to it, and put some good karma in your bag.
On the random news, the crew is already settled in, they are all super motivated with full on racing mentality. At night we can sleep much better, bucket showers still very popular and crew bought speakers in Panama so there is more music all the time, we miss a lot of our ex-crew members who we know would have loved to sail in these conditions. Florian is coming back for Leg 8, and maybe someone else would too? Let us know please. Ok, bye, bye, big hug to you all, smile every day and cheer for us! We will be pushing harder and harder every day, you can count on that!
Nano, Angus and the Punta Caribbean riders