Quick update. The keyboard is now completely broken, so I'm using the nav
computer. Not sure I'm really supposed to be doing this, but since it's
midnight and things are very quiet, I think nobody will mind.
Biggest personal news is that I've come down with a cold. There's a bit
going around. Not too many people to catch things from out here, but two
people got on with colds, and I think it was inevitable it would spread
eventually. In normal life, I'd work from home for a couple of days and
that would be it. Out here though, it's hard to "dial in" to a sail change.
I'm determined to answer the bell for every watch, but I'm definitely not
100% effective. My comparative advantage is grinding winches and lifting
heavy things, and this has sapped my energy. But these things still have to
be done, and I still end up in the half of the crew doing them, just more
slowly than normal.
Conditions have gotten quiet. It's a welcome respite, though it comes with
the significant downside that we aren't making much progress toward
Qingdao. Still in with a chance of arrival on the 11th, though things will
have to pick up a bit, as they should in a couple of days. I think we
should be using this to rest people a bit more, but Matt has had other
ideas. We put the Code 1 (the big spinnaker) up at the 2am watch last
night. This is a huge piece of work, both hoisting it and wooling/packing
it away when done. It stayed up for 30 minutes. Then, at lunchtime today,
he wanted us to pull up and wash floorboards and clean out bilges. I can't
deny the boat is now cleaner, but I'm not sure that was the best use of
time and energy from a tired crew.
We've seen a few pods of dolphins over the last days, though we seem to be
too slow for them to bother playing around with us much. There were some
other mystery leaping fish this evening as well as occasional remaining
flying fish, but wildlife is pretty thin overall. Shipping traffic, on the
other hand, it thick. At one point last night, we had no fewer than seven
other ships in sight. One tried to signal us in Morse by light rather than
radio for some reason. We decided to avoid, ducking behind but still
passing very close. It was ENORMOUS. Earlier tonight, the other watch say
they saw a US aircraft carrier. Not surprised there's one around, but I am
surprised we got that close.
We passed by Okinawa earlier today. That was pretty cool. We've seen a few
other picturesque islands off Taiwan as well and some nice sunsets. Right
now, we have a clear sky and lots of stars.
The boat keeps falling apart, but we keep fixing it... mostly. We have a
fix for the mast track, again a bit of a kludge, but it's enough that we're
sailing with a main again. We're having some problems with the connection
from the pedestal to the port primary (i.e. the thing that allows up to
four people to grind a winch together for big jobs connection to one of the
big winches), but it is partially fixed. We were having trouble with the
generator (which I really like to point out, as Clipper Race Office
censored an earlier mention of generator problems from the Skipper blog),
but that seems to be fixed now. Our one remaining problem is the inner
forestay. A split pin sheared, leaving the connecting pin to partially slip
out and the bracket to bend before it was caught. Fortunately, it was
caught before it leg go completely, but several repair attempts have been
unsuccessful, and it probably just has to wait for a new bracket in
Qingdao. This means we can't fly a staysail (a smallish headsail that hangs
from the inner forestay). This costs us a bit of speed, but it does making
tacking simpler and frees up some winches for reefing, so glass half-full
and all that.
That's all for now. I'll try post more updates if I can, but it will
continue to be hit-and-miss until the keyboard gets replaced in Qingdao.
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