Boat Diary

Part 4

27th November:

Surprisingly we had a nice day of sailing and lots of sunshine during our shift. We noticed that the wind was backing, which was a sign that the high was passing, followed by light rain. The whole day we flew Code 2 and made good progress compared to the other boats, and we closed the distance to UNICEF.

Due to God knows what possible reason, the spinnaker halyard shackle opened again and the spinnaker was holding by the safety strop only. I was wondering what could be the reason for it as it was the second time in a row that this same thing happened to us. Knowing that the wind will increase by the late afternoon, we just continued with the hope that the safety strop will do its job. Our prayer got listened to and after a few hours, we dropped code 2 and hoisted Yankee 1 and the staysail. The night went pretty smooth and we just followed our routine.

It's very sad that we still haven’t got a single night where we could see the stars. It’s only the Southern cross that is visible for us sometimes.

28th November:

The daily blog stops here and I am just writing from my memories now.

The Southern Ocean has now, after many days of Champion sailing, shown us it's other face - the angry and wild one. Every single shift was exhausting in every way. Every move, every action was just painfully draining. On average, we had 30 plus knots on a beam / broad reach and on top of it, the wind came straight from the South. The wind was coming straight from Antarctica and what a different experience it was as compared to the previous ones where you thought it's already too cold.

Due to the extreme cold, we ran a shift within the shift. We tried that nobody stayed for more than 1 hour on deck and we rotated the jobs. Not only we saw a freezing cold breeze from the South but the sea state also changed to rough conditions. Most of the time we had the 2nd reef in the mainsail and flying along with Yankee 2. Qingdao was flying again but due to the extreme challenging environment the whole team got exhausted too quickly and anybody could barely speak anymore. Once we returned from our shifts, everybody just crushed into their bunks and passed out.

Wind chill is the factor that gets under your cloth and straight into your bones. I was wearing my base layer, two mid-layers and the final wet weather foulies. I looked like a marshmallow man and every move on the deck was just difficult. This was the time to launch the 5 mm neoprene scuba gloves. These I had already used on my sailing trip from Faroer Island to Bodo in Norway and was fascinated how warm they kept my hands. On top of it, I was also wearing my new mid-layer dry suit that made my life so much better on board. It is difficult to believe but everything was just wet.

Inside the boat, due to condensation, water is running down the walls and dropping from the ceiling. I have never, in my life, experienced such condition on waters.