Commodore
January 27, 2022

Place your ETA bets! We’ve lost the mainsail, oops

Thank you so much to everyone who sent in the 20 birthday messages, they were forwarded to Mumma to bring her some birthday joy this morning! I hear the birthday festivities are off to a flying start

Thanks to all the bets in for arrival times tonight, so far we have the following, please email or text me to submit yours! +447577461740 or phoebe@gormleyandgamble.com

Peter Fanning – 21:00

Jonny Chadd – 22:30

Chris & Isobel 23:17

Lucy Platt – 23:50

Janice Merrick – 23:57

Chris Marchant – 23:59

Ripmans – 24:00

Thompsons – 1:00am

Mine – 2:00am

Kay Widlake – 2:20am

Grandpa 29th 5am

Granny 29th 7am

Marshalls 8:41!!! (almost insulting)

(I’ll update these again tonight when more come in)

Closest bet wins a polepole crew video and a round of Hannah’s mocktails on their next visit!

The main drama since the post came through is that they’ve lost the mainsail – so perhaps Granny and Grandpa’s bets were the most realistic! At 4pm UK time they had 54 nautical miles to go with an average speed of 150nm per 24 hours. I’ll leave the maths to you!

January 27 Day 18

An early birthday present, Rowan did my 6 to 9am shift. We had motored all night without any sails up and he was keen to get the sails back up. The screens are showing just over 200 miles to go. Looking optimistic to arrive tomorrow. We will most likely arrive in the late afternoon so won’t have cleared customs to be able to go out, but there are plenty of places in the marina to celebrate, although we think the 9pm curfew is still in force.

The wind has really died and messing us about. Various sails went up and down but the engines were responsible for the vast majority of the miles covered. Very frustrating as we all just want to get there now. Luckily I’ve got stuck into the book Jonny Chadd gave us, Great Circle, which is a good ripping read to pass the time away.

It was a beautiful evening so we took our mocktails up front to the trampoline to enjoy the setting sun. We wondered why we hadn’t done this every night! While our baked potatoes cooked we had a few rounds of speed scrabble, but we never managed to topple Han from her winning position.

Felt weird knowing it was our last night of shifts, as lucky timing would have it, it was my night off, so I will be very well rested to face my 60th year!