Commodore
January 17, 0202

17th January – The Spice Girls have arrived!

The Code sail stayed up all night, in bright full moon light and very gentle winds. But the wind completely died and I had to put the engines on during my 6-9am shift. It was a little disheartening having no wind again, but thankfully it slowly picked up again during the late morning, and the Asymmetric was hoisted when we were getting a consistent 8knots of wind speed.

Sunrise

We had one big boat show on the radar and it turned out to be an enormous Japanese fishing boat. Seriously depressing as we avoided it’s many buoys which we assume are holding long lines, for 30 miles we reckon. Seems such a crime, fishing like that but assume we are so far from any country that they can do whatever they like.

Fishing buoys with radar poles in the middle of the Atlantic

Old Eagle Eyes thinks he spotted a shark chasing a huge ‘flock’ of flying fish, or maybe they were flying away from the Japanese fishermen.

Low winds meant that we kept the Asymmetric up all the time, late afternoon the winds picked up a little and improved our speed a bit. As we get a trickle of info through from the Arc Rally and various other boats that we are in contact with via satellite, the competitive edge is kicking in. We had been way down the daily Arc league table (every boat has a tracker, which you can look at on the App YB Races) but now we have turned right and have avoided the worst of the big lull area (which a lot of boats are stuck in) we are marching up the table, much to everyone’s excitement.

We decided to keep the Asymmetric up all night. I realise for the non sailors reading the blog I have been a bit confusing calling the sails by different names. The Asymmetric, I was referring to as our Gennaker sail in the blog of our sail to the Canaries. We had a little team talk and decided that we needed better names for our sails, especially as the Dutch boat Brainstorm who we are in contact with via satellite are sending us their daily blogs which are very entertaining, and have some great names for their sails, their Gennaker they call the big Whomper.

After a lot of deliberation, and thinking better of using Phoeb’s English essay from when she was 12 years old that she got zero marks for, when she described her English teacher having an affair and having to sail to freedom using a bra of mine! Bra sizes are not woke ……..we thought better of calling the Gennaker – Jenny DD! We have decided to use the 5 Spice girls instead.

Jib is Posh

Gennaker (Asymmetric) is Ginger

Code is Sporty

Storm spinnaker is Baby

Wingaker is Scary

And this is how I will refer to them from now on. That was a good way to pass an idle couple of hours!

The sunset and full moon rising all happening so close together has been spectacular. The silver bright light of the moon has been spectacular. We have every supper by candlelight as we can’t have a light on at night, so that the person on watch can see out. The moon was so bright it felt like we were eating with a light on.