Day 7 - Greenwich crossed!

 

So we have crossed Greenwich Meridian! Crossing this imaginary line is quite significant to us because it marks approximately one third of our journey so far. The first third is generally regarded as the toughest part of the race, and this year the reasons were plainly evident.

 

Crossing Greenwich also means that we have started making good headway in the westerly direction, and I think that we have crossed it far enough north to stay in the trade winds and out of the South Atlantic High for now. That points out the next milestone we are about to reach - which is reaching the Latitude of Rio. This means our results will start to be comparable to the leading boats, who have already done most of their northern haul.

 

We are making very good way at the moment, we have the big zebra kite up (still to be named) and getting in a couple of great surfs when good waves present themselves. A good surf almost doubles our speed on GPS for a couple of seconds, which is a valuable contribution to our average speed (and few other boats surf as well as this one does!)

 

Our Greenwich celebrations were enhanced by Michaela making her first batch of Crumpets, which was a great contribution to the morale on board! The food this week has been great in general (by racing yacht standards) with our dry-ice and most fresh food only running out now.

 

So that leaves us with two weeks of eating a variety of preserved foods something that student life has easily prepared a few of us for! Motivation to get there quickly will increase from now on as the cravings for fresh produce start to kick in. Maybe that's why some of the professional teams eat preserved food right from the start!

 

Thanks again for all the messages, we take great pleasure reading them out at the end of each day.

 

Ricky

Day 6 - Soaring

We have been on the water for almost a week now. I have been asked to pen our update for day 6.

Firstly, I would like to reiterate all sentiments and notions to the effect of the first two days being horrendously rough and taxing. It was a hard test of a lot of things, and everyone had to take their medicine.

But thankfully that is behind us now, and we find ourselves remarking that THIS, now, is more like what we signed up for. The first few days are for asking yourself why the hell you do this, and the rest of the trip provides the answer. It's also good to hear that our friends on team AMTEC Wits are back on track and still in the game. The Kudu and the Zebra are on their way.

As you may have noticed from the sudden flood of blog posts yesterday, we finally got our email up and running. Rick and Kax literally spent hours on our spare sat-phone trying to hook up the connection. After much toil, we have connection! You couldn't wipe the smile off Ricky's face with a chloroform rag. We may be back to dial-up, but it's better than the stone age.

Our sea-life tally has been bolstered with the sightings of sea-turtle and porpoise. We also found our first stowaway flying-fish - freeloading behindthe life-raft.

We've been loving the e-mails and comments coming through! Reyn Varkvisser, it's been so long! Keep those jokes coming. For those of you who don't know how it works, we have a friend who forwards us all of the blog comments and e-mails to teamciaobella@gmail.com . All we know is that he's called the stig. The stig has a female counter-part doing the same for our facebook group, and we're not sure whether to call her the stiglet, or the stigarette.

Now onto the sailing (because there has also been a bit of that). We put up the still-unnamed big zebra spinnaker on Thursday morning and have no current plans for taking it down. We have gybed so to head a bit further north, and give a bit of clearance to that South-Atlantic high-pressure system, and the ghostly light winds that accompany it.

We were in 5th place the last time we checked, and are going full-tilt, guns blazing. We'll be looking to pick off those positions one at a time.

Like a snake in the grass, or a thief in the night, or a... cat in the hat.

I don't know. You get the gist.

It's just a case of following the Zebra to Rio.

Brennan

P.S. Can someone tell us if we have had a thumbs-up from Charlie Hutton-Squire in hospital?

A sombre moment...

Hearing of the passing of someone that we had not yet met, but who had embarked on a similar venture to our own, and who would more than likely have become our friend (sailing is like that) was very disturbing.

We wish to pass on our condolences to his family and friends, and especially to his crew mates. We are walking close to them at this time.

We are also walking close to those who may experience a sense of responsibility. Theirs is not an enviable position and we hope that they will feel our support.

Ocean racing is an extreme sport, and there will always be an element of danger. The situation of being in close contact with unpredictable elements of enormous power is what the sport is all about. Every effort is taken to harness these elements as safely as possible – but there are no guarantees. We recognise this, and are under no illusions that these facts also apply to us.

This news, combined with the news of the passing of Rob Meek (a very special friend), and the news of the retirement of 10 boats (with all the disappointment and unfulfilled dreams that these retirements entail) have enhanced a feeling deep within us, that we are especially blessed to be able to do this very special thing together.

Day 5: Up to speed again

Last night was the first night where we had a full complement of crew on watch, with most having gotten over the seasickness. It was a blessing as we were very close on running out of Valoid, Stugeron and... Woollies chocolate brownies!

The watch is currently working on a three people on, three people off system. The nights are at least getting warmer (it’s all relative), but getting up for the 1am shift remains the pits. Especially when the watches before you have nabbed all the hot chocolate and you left drinking instant coffee mixed in not-quite-boiling-water.

The days have become far more pleasant. It’s still not Speedo weather, but enough to warrant wide-brimmed hats and high SPF sunscreen. While our comm’s are still giving us trouble, today we made our first batch of desalinated water. We are very excited as there is nothing worse than brushing your teeth with salt water.

In this race we have four new spinnakers, and we are looking for suggestions. Each of our spinnakers always had names. Our star performers in the last race were Big Bertha and Jemima, and Isabelle – none of which made the trip this time. Big Bertha and Jemima were put into retirement, whilst Isabelle had to be cut loose off the Transkei coast. Gunther, a gorgeous grey and blue kite designed by our boy Shane Elliott, is still in attendance.

But now we have a predicament. None of our new spinnakers have names. We have a turquoise code 0, a blue and white asymmetric kite, and two new white Investec-zebra-branded spinnakers (a big one and a small one). Ryan has suggested that the one of the Investec spinnakers be named Marty (after the character in the Madagascar movie), but this has been vetoed. The crew looks forward to hearing your suggestions. In keeping with how things have been done, ladies’ names would be preferred.

Day 4: Bring on the sunshine

We have renamed Ciao Bella: Hillbrow on Sea. The cockpit is covered in clothing, sleeping bags and mattresses as we attempt to get them dry. It’s a bit of a risky exercise because every now and then a rogue wave makes an appearance and wets half of it again.

We have spent most of the last two days trying to get our email communication up and running. The hardware was damaged in the storm, and we’ve had to rely on a spare sat phone handset for calls and texts in the meantime. We have still had no luck. Our email outbox tally is up to 4 messages now.

We haven’t seen too much wildlife this time round. We’ve seen a whale, a shark, bluebottles but no dolphins. The flying fish have also started to make some appearances. One thing that we have seen plenty of are albatrosses. No shortage of those guys. It’s a little strange to see so many of them so far north, but we are not complaining.

The nights remain bitterly cold.

It has been a treat to be able to still be eating fresh fruit this far in. A big vote of thanks to the Largier family for the great nectarines from Little Oaks, and to the Hutton-Squires for the yummy apples from their farm in Elgin.

Day 3: The barometer starts to rise

The barometer reading finally started lifting at around 11pm last night, and with that the breeze settled down. The state of the sea remained a mess though, making it a very bumpy ride. It was also bitterly cold. You must know how cold you are when the water from the Benguela current crashing over you actually feels warm.

At this stage it was not only our foul weather gear that was soaked. We got off watch to find our mid layer soft-shell, and base layers all soaked. Bunks were wet, sleeping bags damp, and sense of humours low.

Due to the high levels of seasickness, we decided to move to a diet of rehydrate and woollies chocolate brownies. Not because the brownies had any particular nutritional value, but rather because they drastically improve the taste of whatever came up.

This morning however, looks far better. It was the first sunrise of the trip (yesterday we were robbed of a sunrise). The conditions have also improved, resulting in us shaking out the reef and put our small kite up. The inside of the boat resembles a Hillbrow balcony, with clothes hanging everywhere, but hopefully we can get most of the stuff dried out before tonight.

After a relatively rough day 2, it is time to make up some lost ground. We hoping that we can get the pocket-rocket (Ryan) onto the helm later today provided he starts to feel better. We’ve decided to bribe him with the last roti and samoosa, sent kindly to us from the Jacobs family. We are ready for those trade winds now...

Day 2: Rough times and tough times

Sunday 3am, the southerly hit. Accompanied by a few rain squalls – it was a long night. Very poor visibility, and terribly cold and wet due to the non-stop rain. There was no sunrise. We didn't have a day, only 12 hours that were slightly less dark than the night.

The conditions on Sunday afternoon were very reminiscent to those experienced in the 2011 Vasco da Gama (a yacht race from Maputo to Durban): high winds and very rough seas. Waves were crashing over the cockpit, making it a very uncomfortable experience. We had lost our wind instruments and mast head navigation lights and our visibility was down to 20m due to the mist and driving rain. Many of the waves had about 1m of white water on top of them that could have made situation very different for us if a bigger one were to hit us. It got to the point where the safest thing we
could do was drop the entire mainsail, lash it to the boom and use only the storm jib to broad reach through the thick of the windiest part of the front to get to the calmer water on the other side.

With more men down than up at sunset, and the rough conditions still prevailing, we decided rather to take it easy through the night. We had already lost a spinnaker pole, and didn’t want to risk shredding the main sail. With the boat packed up snugly, we got ready to see out the last of the rough weather.

After all, as Naas would say: the Currie Cup wasn’t won in June.

BAM! Our email is up and running. Nothing trumps tenacity.

It has been a tedious process, but after much determination we have been able to make it work. Since Sunday's bad weather, our email communication has been down and we have been limited to texts and calls.

Have a drink after work to celebrate this momentous occasion. We'll be sharing a slab of dairy chocolate.

An important reason for restoring an email connection was the ability to receive weather files. Something that we haven't been able to download since Sunday.

An equally important reason has been that we can continue to share our adventure with you. We will send through the blog entries that were written over the past few days later today to get you all up to date. Dad will also be speaking on RSG tomorrow (Friday) between 7am and 8am tomorrow, so if you have a chance you should try tune in. Lastly, The Stig is also able to pass on your emails to us, so feel free to email teamciaobella@gmail.com.

 

Quick update

 

The Robinson family and everyone at Team Ciao Bella would like to express their condolences to the crew and family of Bille. This does come a quite a shock and detail surrounding this is limited. More information will follow as soon as we receive anything.

 

On a positive note, the weather is much calmer and swells are down. The days ahead look to be much better and with a morning breeze passing us by.

 

Thank you to everyone following. We are working through the connectivity issues and will be on touch soon.

No full blog post today due to bad weather

Team Ciao Bella has been having email issues since yesterday due some very stormy weather. The quick sms they sent through to mission control said that whilst yesterday was a bit rough on the high seas, it has since cleared. Everyone on board is doing well and full of smiles!