8 hours off between watches... what would you use those hours for?
After giving a sample of the 2 hour night watch the other day and the general gist of the watch system on Gitana, there's another side to this sailing malarkey and that's the 'down' time. It'd be easy to imagine we just sit about, sleep and eat but amazingly there's always something that needs doing. Don't get me wrong, sleep happens – but most of us are running on 2 hour blocks of sleep at a time at the moment, so it has made for an interesting few days of adjustment.
The watch system on here runs 24 hours a day for however long we're at sea,which means everything happens when we're at sea. From midnight to midnight life onboard doesn't stop; it does go quiet for a bit in the middle of the night, but you're never too far from something to do or someone to talk to.
Once the sun comes up, crew start emerging from their bunks. Whoever makes it to the cooker first puts the first pot of tea on for the morning (or coffee if you're Dave) shortly after sunrise. By 9am most people are awake. The person off watch at 8am sorts the galley out after the night watches, and makes the days bread; the next person off at 10am is in charge of making lunch, the one off at 12pm will take charge of the washing up and so the jobs continue. Everyone plays a role.
Every morning, there's a deck check – making sure nothing has chafed in the night with the sails, blocks and ropes; the charts (maps) need sorting so we can plot our progress and track where we are in the fleet, weather requests are prepped. By lunchtime, the water maker gets going turning salty sea water into fresh water and batteries are charged by running the engine. Then there's the trouble shooting - after discovering a grinding noise in the auto-helm, Mike clambered into the storage locker by the steering to see what the problem was, within the hour it was sorted and we're good to go. Cleaning and tidying up in a small space is also essential with 5 people, so we take it in turns (toilets and all).
Have you noticed, we didn't even mention sorting the sails yet? Although downwind sailing leaves you with the same sails up for a lot of time, we have to make small changes (when it's too windy, if the wind changes direction or dies off), but even little changes take time in a rolling sea! We have time to read and relax, chat, take the mick out of each other, be quiet in each others company. On a boat that never stops moving, we never totally switch off, it keeps you busy and burns your own energy as well as the boat's!
The hard work is paying off though, we're 2nd in class, just 4 miles behind the lead boat after 7 days and making good time and speed... we finally dipped under 2000 nautical miles to go yesterday, which based on current speed means we could be in the Caribbean in 11 days time! We're watching our fellow rally boats with interest helping us to make decisions about best course for our boat and the conditions.
Even though we've been at sea for 7 days now, we've finally reached a rhythm with the boat and each other, there's a lot of book recommendations for each other, much laughter and many stories to be told. Although some of us have known each other for 20 years or more, we've all travelled in different directions over the years, so our lives have radically changed from the students we once were! Working together 24/7 is closing those gaps!
So, 2 hours on, 8 hours 'off', doesn't seem very 'off' now does it?
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Coming soon... Imagine a story that starts with – There's a naval architect, a teacher,an estate agent, a superyacht captain and a retired freight forwarder (or full time adventure teller as we know him better) on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic...
Q&A reminder
We're looking forward to getting some more questions through to the boat so we can have a Q&A blog soon, ask away, if you don't have the boat email – send your questions via the FB SYGitana page and they can be forwarded on to us onboard!
Fair winds and 8kts please!
Kirsty
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SY Gitana