GREEN DRAGON EMAIL: 'We have had to pay quite a high price to be the western most boat'

Friday 17 October 2008 21:54

Green Dragon - Ian Moore (navigator)

Its felt like a very long day and sleep has been short again for Ian and I. We have been watching the progress of the Russians and Delta Lloyd and trying not to get reactive when we see the looming large in the rear window.

In fact the 3 hourly scheds have started to show them as ahead of us now and its very easy to say we should try and cover them but we are also trying to look at the bigger picture.

We have had to pay quite a high price to be the western most boat and I guess we will know in the next 24 hours if our strategy pays off.

If not the boys will be dark. We made them gybe 6 or 8 times today, sometimes in short succession and you forget how a simple tack or gybe is actually the most gruelling manoeuvre we have to do.

It means that everybody has to be up, moving the stack of all the gear below and for the guys offwatch it means they miss sleep too.

Youngster thinks I'm picking on him because he always seems to be offwatch when its time to gybe. He has however taken sail stacking to a whole new level.

It now towers above the helmsman in the aft corner of the cockpit supported by numerous stacking ties and posts and provides some protection from the squadrons of attacking flying fish.

Well hopefully the gybe frenzy is over and we might be into some reaching over the next few days.

In other news we got lost today. Both my GPS's failed today. The expensive one this morning so we seamlessly swithced to the cheapy backup, but then this afternoon that failed too.

At one point I had to wait for the Sched to come in to find out where we were. Im not worring too much as the boat is actually full of GPS's.

All the Sat C's and AIS beacons have a built in GPS and if I cant get one of mine fully working I will jury rig something from one of those. If all I fails I will break out the $9.99 Plastic Sextant.