Puma Leg Five Day 16

Woke up grumpy this morning, or perhaps I should say - I got woken up and it made me grumpy...... ‘Rick, it’s getting light (the wind) we need to get weight forward.... you can’t sleep there’, (curled up on a bean bag in a nice drafty corner at the back of the boat), ‘we’re trying to win a yacht race here........’

I'd been up all night shooting video of our little tactical gamble to sail between the Fijian Islands rather than around as all of our competition except Telefónica Blue had opted to do..... Will it work? We'll find out long after I've sent this blog. After the Islands we will be set up with a fair amount of east/west separation as the boats line up for the scoring gate at NZ.

So back to me and my bad mood, once woken up I decided that there was  no way I could get back to sleep in my now agitated state, especially  with the  offer I had received to sleep up in the  cooling breeze  under the forward hatch on a soft sail..... It’s like those rip-off holiday brochures..... What they didn't mention was that the sail would be soaking wet and my head would be next to a 10 day old trash bag!  OK so what should I do? No way am I spending another minute on the computer for now, are my eyes going square!  ......... There's nothing much happening on deck by the sound of things, I have all the night time footage that I need for the time being and, oh yes, the batteries are flat on the camera light anyway.   Are you getting the picture here.... I don't work well when I'm in a bad mood.

 My watch is reading 1510 hrs.  That’s  ten  past three in the afternoon,  but the physical time right now on the boat is  0310 hrs,  that’s  ten  past three  in the morning. We are exactly 180 degrees on the opposite side of the world from the United Kingdom so the time just sort of flips itself... why are we running on UK time or GMT?  Because we will sail so much distance to the east   and thru so many time zones on this leg, it makes it easier to find a time that is constant and run with that, all of our instrumentation and scheduling from Volvo also operates on GMT as well.

Cup of tea....I head off to the galley only to discover that we are  out of tea bags for the next couple of days,  in theory I'm the only tea  drinker on the boat  and I get allocated  three bags per day!! Problem is that other people tend to become tea drinkers the moment they step on a boat! Oh well, I'll have a coffee. It will be my first of the trip.  Mug in hand I stick my head out of the hatch to see what’s going on....... I am greeted  by the most glorious starry sky  imaginable, so I quickly decided that I would chill out  and  drink my  coffee on deck .......   Hot drinks on deck are not explicitly banned, but they most certainly are frowned upon by some, but not others, on our boat. It's really dark so no-one will see me, so I sort of hide the cup inside my silhouette and head to the bow and the comfort and safety of an A4 spinnaker.

Once in position I could begin to really appreciate what a fantastic night it was. The Fijian  Islands were upwind of us about 30  miles but there was still the unmistakeable smell of soil and  vegetation on the wind, I thought of our  emergency stop at the  Philippines on the last leg and the way a 12 hour stop had actually  caused us to catch the leaders.  The wind was blowing around nine knots and the sea was perfectly flat, subsequently no splashing at all.... a very rare occurrence on a Volvo 70.... This fact alone is enough to cheer me up. The coffee is warm and tastes great, I have a brilliant 45 minutes up there, and no-one even knows I'm there. I'm now feeling refreshed and awake so I head down and clean my mug and the galley.

The sun is starting to poke its nose out of the horizon to the west; I should probably get to work........

Rick Deppe MCM