SY Mustique Blog Day 4
Life on board
This blog is written for the friends and family who are less familiar with
the daily and nightly routines of a yacht sailing across the Atlantic.
There are 4 of us on the crew of Mustique,, a 66 foot Moody. We are a cross
section of nationalities, skipper Fin (Irish), then Stefan (Montenegrin),
Scott (Scottish of course) and Becki (English).
Sailing a yacht 24 hours per day for a number of weeks takes a considerable
amount of organisation. For example, it is standard to run a watch system to
ensure that there is always someone on deck driving the boat / making sure
things are smooth sailing, but at the same time making sure everyone gets
enough sleep. Our watch system fits the 12 hour day nicely into our 4 crew and
consists of each crew member doing 3 hours on watch within a 12 hour period. So
you have 9 hours within the rest of the day to rest / clean / /cook keep the
person on watch company. This is working really well and spending a night watch
on your own with just the moon and some shooting stars for fun is actually
quite a pleasurable experience.
Meal times as you can imagine fit neatly around the watch system and are an
integral part of the daily routine, sometimes being the highlight of the day!
Most of the main dinners have been pre-cooked by Fin and Stef, then frozen, so
it is simply a case of defrosting them. Eating on board a rolling, heeling yacht
brings its own challenges,. so we are eating our dinners out of large tupperware
bowls, meaning less chance of spillage!
In amongst the homecooked meals, we have a daily 'snack pack' - a
pre-packed bag of surprise goodies such as sweets, cookies and chocolate. The
daily opening ceremony of one of these snack packs can bring a frenzied
excitement to what was previously a cold / wet / boring watch!
Little comforts like this, as well as the opportunity to hang a fishing rod
off the back of the boat (OK so we're not really racing), going swimming on a
still day like today, all become big events in the lives of 4 sailors at sea for
a long time!