Life and routine on board

Our day is split into watches which means that the day is split 6am to noon and noon to 1800h. During the night from 18h to 22h then 22h to 0200 and from then until 0600h.

Crew must be on deck ten minutes before the watch officially starts for a full watch handover. This entails finding out what happened during the watch, what sails you’re flying as well as

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Team dynamics

We have a really great bunch of folk on our crew, a mix of nationalities, backgrounds and very different reasons for being on a racing yacht across the Atlantic.

For ten of us it’s just one of eight legs around the world, for nine they disembark in Rio and another two stay with us until Australia.

Enemy number one

Whether you’re a baby’s bottom or a piece of equipment on board, chafe is your number one enemy, for a baby it means a good dollop of sudocrem and the boat requires imagination and whipping thread along with anti-chafe ‘socks’.

Naming of the watches

An important event in the life of team Switzerland, and as it turns out an easy one for one watch.

Due to a rather extended night out a number of the crew were feeling a little worse for wear due in no small part to their not insignificant consumption of jäger bombs.

The end of the beginning

A day out of Rio and we’re on full swing getting as many jobs done as possible before we arrive. We have a list of jobs as long as your arm not to mention re-stocking the boat of food; cleaning materials etc.

The finish

Is not quite ours yet, however Jamaica has overnight crossed the finish line 19 seconds ahead of PSP. Can you believe it, after nearly 5,000 miles of ocean racing and it comes down to 19 seconds…wow.

I’m so chuffed for skipper Peter Stirling with whom I did my level 3 training

Mid-life crisis

My husband told me that whilst at a friend’s for dinner one of the guests said to him, “oh, so you’re the one whose wife is having a mid-life crisis”.

That comment made me grin. What a way to play out a mid-life crisis if indeed I was having one.  I wondered what kind of mid-life crisis she was actually referring to,

How things change

Awesome sleep of eight hours. But upon waking I wondered if we’d turned around and headed north for a re-run of the doldrums.

So our 6am watch began with peeling the spinnakers, wooling the code 3 spinnaker with me standing in the bag stuffing it on the very confined space of the rope/ sail locker.
We went up to the code 1 spinnaker which sadly on extremely light (non-existent) wind,

So near and yet so far

Thankfully (ish) actually none of the fleet has made it to Rio yet and it’s October 5th, outside of the arrival window thanks to the doldrums episode. The leaders will probably arrive in the next day or so with us expected on the 9^th.

We still have the medium weight spinnaker flying and have just gybed to get a better run into Rio. During the night we’ll be going through

Exhausted

Ever had that feeling when your batteries have simply run dry?
I keep putting into context the extended sailing time we have to do to climbing a mountain on my bike, thinking that the next corner heralds the end when in fact you still have 5 km to go.
And then my crew mate pointed out