We are in good shape apart from instrument failures particularly the autohelm cutting in and out.We have been flying our lovely yellow and blue spinnaker downwind which gives us a very quiet and stable ride for cooking, reading and contemplation and a question that popped up was ‘Why do we go sailing?’
You take 4 blokes who hardly know each other, having nothing in common apart from sailing and you put them in a small room which like ‘Hotel California’ they can never leave. Then you continually tilt the room in all directions to put them off there balance and occasionally wet them with sea water to make them cold and sticky . They can of course wash this off with more sea water making them even more sticky.
You then address their mental state by sleep deprivation. This a achieved by giving them a bed two feet wide, with a sheet or sleeping bag that is covered in a thin film of body grease, hopefully their own but not always, which combined with the salt on your skin, sticks their sheet to them perfectly so that when they role over they unmake the bed with most of the bedding ending up around their neck or their legs. I say role over but in doing this you will probably role off the bed onto the floor, or you let the lurching boat simply throw you onto the floor.
Assuming you stay in your bunk you will only be allowed to do so for three hours until the guy coming off watch suggests in a loud voice right by your ear that it is your turn to be on deck, where it is raining heavily, the vomit from the previous watch will not be cleared up until the morning and there is twenty thousand ton oil tanker that is on a collision course with your yacht and cannot be raised on the radio .
And what about those precious three hours? Well apart from the crashing of the sails and boom above your head, there is the tomato sauce bottle that is sliding up and down the condiment shelf and after the hundredth time that it bangs into the Branston Pickle jar you can take no more, swear roundly, throw off your bedclothes and go and stuff a sock between the two, only to notice when you are back in bed that the spare lifejacket gas cylinders have broken loose under your bunk and are now clanking together. Meanwhile the watch keeper is crashing around below making tea and when he finally goes on deck a loud message accompanied by static comes over the radio. Inevitably you will want to go to the toilet in the night. If you stand up in the toilet you will need eight arms to wedge yourself against the walls and even then accuracy is not guaranteed. If you sit down then the insubstantial seat fixings of marine toilets will inevitably allow the toilet seat to move around or even sheer off leaving you sitting on the floor.
I have described above some of the fun parts of sailing but will deal with downsides in a later Blog.
Meanwhile yacht Raylah nears Cape Verde