Trucial Coast, Day 18 - a record day
Andrew Hunt December 12th, 2007
Well it looks like the Atlantic doesn’t want to let us go without a bit of a reminder of what she’s like - we’ve had a few showers this morning and one squall! So we’re definitely not there yet.Yesterday took a big chunk out of our remaining distance: it was a record day covering 181.1 nm at an average speed of 7.24 knots. Our DTF as I sit here now is 275.6 miles so we’re still on course for an early morning arrival on Friday. It’s not uncommon for the ARC to be described as a “milk run” because of its supposedly easy conditions. Now if you were lucky enough to get 10 days or so of days like yesterday (which does sometimes happen) then I can see why you would think it a milk run: easy sailing, covering large distances and with no nasty squalls or showers in sight. The only thing you’d have to contend with is the rolling of the boat. However, as one of our radio net controllers said the other day whilst we were all immersed in the bad weather, if anyone tries to tell me it was a milk run, I’ll poke them in the eye. That was his suggested sanction, they’d be getting a lot more than a poke in the eye from me!
I’m still mentally thinking of all the things I want to do when we get ashore, but there’s a whole lot of chickens there that are barely even eggs yet, so I’m not going to jinx myself by talking about them just yet! The ship’s clocks went back another hour yesterday so we’re UTC -3 now and we’ll go back another hour on arrival. And other than that I have to confess I’m running out of things to talk about! I think (certainly speaking for myself) we just want to get there now and not have to worry about squalls or have to fight our way to get from one end of the boat to the other - the rolling is particularly bad this morning which is making writing this a bit of a chore as I’m being wrenched away from the navigator’s table and then thrown across it - so I’m calling it a day.
Sorry! There will probably be just two more logs from me now - one tomorrow and one after we arrive on Friday. Of course the Atlantic may have other ideas…..we’ll see!
- General , Sail Race ARC , Staff Travels
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