Getting up in the middle of the night wasn't that bad because the rest of the night I slept really deeply and got up refreshed and ready for a new day. And during anchor watch I was able to spend some time talking with Luís, a really nice guy from Portugal. He usually lives in Brazil but has a home base in Porto, which is very close to where I live, so I am sure we will keep in touch.
After breakfast we pulled up the anchor and I helped with the pulling and it was back breaking work, this anchor is really heavy and it is only the small one!
We then spent the morning practicing boat to boat transfers and towing. I can understand that we needed to do this practice but it wasn't too interesting as most of the preparation and handling was done by the skippers or AQP and we were mostly watching.
After lunch we sailed upwind for a long time, practicing tacks. The idea was to go upwind as much as possible so that we could then practice downwind sailing with the spinnaker. I spent some time talking with Nano about the last race, about Qingdao and about how close Punta del Este was to winning the race, it was a great talk that I enjoyed a lot.
It was finally time to hoist the kite and after hoisting it successfully we tried to open it but it got stuck midways and would not open fully. It looked as though it had somehow been packed twisted so that it was wrapped around itself. We tried several tricks to try to open it but none of them worked, so we had to drop it.
Team Ineke went down below to repack the kite while we continued practicing downwind sailing. It seems that they use a technique to pack the spi which is a bit different from the traditional Clipper way and Josh was showing them how to do it. We then tried to hoist it again and we got the same result where it got stuck midways and would not open. But in this case one of the tricks worked and we were able to finally open it fully.
A wonderful time with the kite up, practicing downwind sailing and doing some gybes which all went perfectly. It was a shame that with so many people on board I did not get the chance to helm a little with the kite.
We then did a man over board drill with the spinnaker up and it all went beautifully, we were able to drop it very quickly and though it took much longer than when no kite is involved, it was much faster than I expected and we were able to recover Bob in less than 10 minutes. During the recovery we practiced something that Nano likes to do, which is that the swimmer is not lowered slowly into the water but rather they jump into it when the casualty is close. Interesting and it worked really well.
Today I did twice the same fuck up of trying to grind a winch without having loaded it fully and put it in the self tailor, which obviously does not work. It was weird because I knew perfectly well what I needed to do and yet I did it wrong. Time to learn and improve!
I volunteered to prepare dinner while we were setting the anchor and I spent some nice time with Maren, she is a great mate and we had a lot of fun. After a never ending session of washing up (someone said that the bowls seem to reproduce as you wash them and I think they are right) I went to bed early as I had had a really exhausting day.
