We started the day having porridge for breakfast. I have always hated porridge, to me it has always been an inedible mash. But today I discovered that if you add enough sugary items like honey or syrup it becomes more or less edible, which is a good discovery as I suspect that we will be eating porridge many days during the race.
Today was our turn to be deckhands so while the rest of the team was busy with other tasks down below, we went up on deck and started preparing everything to leave the dock, starting with a deep look at all the security items like the jackstays, the dan buoy or the hand rails. We also prepared all the mooring lines for our departure. We finally left the dock after stopping at the fuelling point to fill up on diesel. It was great to be finally sailing, the weather was not too bad and I even got to wear my sun glasses for a while.
We started the day by learning how to hoist the main. The process is not too complex but it takes a really long time. The sweaters (the people manually pulling down the halyard until the point where we need to grind it to continue hoisting) did a great effort and it seemed to never end. You think that you must be almost done and when you look up you have barely reached the first spreader. And once you cannot pull by hand any longer you start grinding with the coffee grinder and this also takes ages until the main is fully hoisted.
We then hoisted the staysail and the yankee. The staysail is quite easy as it is a small sail (thought it is probably bigger than any sail in any boat that I have sailed before) but the yankee is huge and again we needed a lot of effort to hoist it fully. The lessons that I seem to be learning is that everything is bigger and requires more people and effort than what I am used to.
We were sailing under full sail now and I saw a lot of smiles on people's faces. It was time to relax a little while lunch was prepared and I used the opportunity to take some pictures. The weather was slowly deteriorating but this was probably the day which was nicer in the whole week
After lunch we learned how to tack. To me it was an easy exercise, the main difficulty was understanding the role of the backstays as I have never sailed a boat with running backstays before this one. The people who had never sailed before were struggling a little bit to understand what was going on and Stefano had the great idea of asking them to take turns in staying behind the cockpit just looking at the manoeuvre as a whole and I think this helped them a lot to understand what was going on.
After a lot of tacking it was our turn to do our first proper MOB. Stefano dropped Bob (our mannequin which simulates the casualty) overboard when no one was looking. This first MOB was a bit disastrous, specially in the communication of the people in the snake pit with the swimmer. We did not have anyone relaying the info from the deck to the swimmer and back, everyone was shouting at the same time and Maxim, our designated swimmer, spent a lot of time going up and down like a tea bag. We finally recovered Bob and had a quick group pow-wow to analyse the MOB and try to find ways to do better next time.
It was starting to get dark so Stefano decided that we would stay the night at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight. While on our way there we started learning all the tasks that needed to be done at the end of the day: dropping the yankee, folding it, storing it in its bag and getting it below decks, dropping the staysail (that one remains on deck in case of an engine failure as a backup), dropping the main sail, preparing all the fenders and mooring lines, mooring, covering the main sail, folding and storing the staysail... None of these procedures were too complex and were familiar enough, everything was just bigger and took more effort and more people. But when we finished the day we were quite exhausted, both mentally and physically with all the new stuff that we had learned today.
We then hoisted the staysail and the yankee. The staysail is quite easy as it is a small sail (thought it is probably bigger than any sail in any boat that I have sailed before) but the yankee is huge and again we needed a lot of effort to hoist it fully. The lessons that I seem to be learning is that everything is bigger and requires more people and effort than what I am used to.
We were sailing under full sail now and I saw a lot of smiles on people's faces. It was time to relax a little while lunch was prepared and I used the opportunity to take some pictures. The weather was slowly deteriorating but this was probably the day which was nicer in the whole week
After lunch we learned how to tack. To me it was an easy exercise, the main difficulty was understanding the role of the backstays as I have never sailed a boat with running backstays before this one. The people who had never sailed before were struggling a little bit to understand what was going on and Stefano had the great idea of asking them to take turns in staying behind the cockpit just looking at the manoeuvre as a whole and I think this helped them a lot to understand what was going on.
After a lot of tacking it was our turn to do our first proper MOB. Stefano dropped Bob (our mannequin which simulates the casualty) overboard when no one was looking. This first MOB was a bit disastrous, specially in the communication of the people in the snake pit with the swimmer. We did not have anyone relaying the info from the deck to the swimmer and back, everyone was shouting at the same time and Maxim, our designated swimmer, spent a lot of time going up and down like a tea bag. We finally recovered Bob and had a quick group pow-wow to analyse the MOB and try to find ways to do better next time.
It was starting to get dark so Stefano decided that we would stay the night at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight. While on our way there we started learning all the tasks that needed to be done at the end of the day: dropping the yankee, folding it, storing it in its bag and getting it below decks, dropping the staysail (that one remains on deck in case of an engine failure as a backup), dropping the main sail, preparing all the fenders and mooring lines, mooring, covering the main sail, folding and storing the staysail... None of these procedures were too complex and were familiar enough, everything was just bigger and took more effort and more people. But when we finished the day we were quite exhausted, both mentally and physically with all the new stuff that we had learned today.
After dinner we went to a pub in Cowes and I was able to have a really nice chat with some of my mates like Jenifer or John. They are a really nice bunch and I am enjoying it a lot with them. The relationship with Stefano and Kym is also very good and it seems that everyone is having a blast.
