30 deg 21 S', 153 deg 46' E -- Race 6, Day 5

So, no post yesterday. Things were very busy and very wet. And today, I
wrote the official Crew Diary entry, so a lot of my good material went
there. Good excuse for me to recommend you check it out. I think I have a
link on the front page of the blog. You'd have to be more interested in
this race than I am to read them all, but it might be interesting to hear a
few other voices, and I suspect I'll be making a few more appearances there
in the future.

That said, I have saved something for you. For example, I mention in the
other post how hot and sweaty it is down below. You really are limited in
how much you can ventilate a boat like this. Any place the bad air can get
out is a place water can get in, quickly turning your boat into a CNN
Special Report, then an artificial reef. When it's really calm, you can
open up a few hatches and portholes, but you run the risk of them being
forgotten or just not closed well when things pick up again. Earlier in the
race, before my time, one porthole was forgotten, leading to several beds
getting soaked when a wave crashed over the side. And just in this race,
the hatch in one of the heads was improperly closed, so I got a cold
saltwater surprise as I was, let's say, reading the sports pages.
Apparently, these hatches are DESIGNED to have a 'closed but not actually
sealed' setting, and this is a semi-known issue around the boat. Why you
would design anything that way is beyond me.

We do our bit to exacerbate the situation. I've talked about the cooking
before and the effort/quality mismatch (as I see it). Turns out, we don't
really do anything to adjust for the environment. Yesterday, it was pasta
for lunch (big boiling pot of water) and Thai green chicken curry (tasty)
with rice (big boiling pot of water) for dinner. This morning, I woke to
see porridge (big boiling pot of water) for breakfast. Seriously people,
would you do this if you were at home?

I wasn't sure those kinds of comments would be embraced by the official
Clipper Crew Diary PR machine, which is why I saved them. But you also get
breaking news! After writing my offical post, I went up on deck to find
this sun shining, birds chirping, small children setting up lemonade
stands.... Well, it wasn't quite that idyllic, but the sun was shining. We
were making 10-14 knots in beautiful weather straight toward our next
waypoint near Fraser Island. Land was again in sight, which is exciting,
even after only a few days away. I spent some more quality time on the
helm, which continues to feel more comfortable. Toward the end of watch, we
got the kite up and picked up speed. And we had confirmation that we're in
third place, though margins are tight and we still have nearly half a race
(or, as Matt put it, "More than a Sydney-Hobart") to go.

Which reminds me, astute readers may have noticed that my last post said we
had done 750nm and were nearly to Sydney and wondered why, given then
Sydney-Hobart is only... I don't know, but it's something beginning with a
'6'. First, there's the 'distance made good' point I discussed earlier,
i.e. the fact that you rarely go straight toward your destination (and part
of why our current situation is so great). Given our tacking angles, I'd
guess the trip downriver from Hobart took us twenty miles through the water
to make ten. The other big factor, and one I'd forgotten myself, was
current. We spent a while in a current moving south at 4-6 knots. Take that
off a water speed of 12-14 knots, we were losing a lot of ground. Yet
another way this sailing thing just refuses to be simple.

Well spotted.