Eat, Sleep, Sail

That is basically what life comes down to. Not always in that order, and not always evenly balanced but those are the only 3 things that matter out here and its quite nice. Very simple living. Yesterday was gorgeous out and today is looking to be the same. we are in a perfect wind vain between the North Atlantic high and a low pressure system to the north that is giving us 15-20 knots of breeze from the south/southwest and sunny skies with warm temperatures. Everyone dried out all their wet clothes yesterday after the squalls the night before, and our deck was quite a spectacle with spray gear and other clothes hanging everywhere possible. Our watch has a very ideal schedule for the next few days. Right now we are on a 5-9 schedule, so 5-9pm last night, then sleep all night and now we are up for our 5-9am shift. Everyday the watch that crosses 12 noon does a 5 hour shift so that the watches offset by an hour. So this means when we end our watch at 9 I have the entire day off and don´t go back on watch until 6 pm. Quite nice. I suppose its because we chose a southern route, and we will see if it pays off from a race perspective, but if nothing else its making for some amazing warm weather sailing. I was expecting to be taking a route similar to most of the 2nd fleet and be up off the coast of Nova Scotia getting as close to point Alpha (iceberg mark) as possible. I packed ready for winter, and instead have spent the last few days in nothing but shorts. No complaints here. Yesterday we had a consistent 10-15 ft swell coming off our starboard stern, and today the swell seems to have blown out a little bit making it a lot choppier. This makes for some tough driving because the boat gets tossed around quite a bit and you have to really focus and fight to keep her straight. When you get in the groove though, it is a thing of beauty. There really isn´t an easy way to describe surfing an 88 ft 70 ton boat...but its pretty freaking awesome. Riding up on the bow is quite amazing too, you really feel the power of the boat and the acceleration down the waves. Looking around this morning and seeing nothing but massive peaking waves and white caps in every direction is beautiful. Surprisingly we still see quite a few birds out here, not quite sure how, but they just always seem to be hanging out, playing in the wind and the waves. OH! and i almost forgot...WE SAW A PILOT WHALE YESTERDAY!!! It surfaced about 10-20 ft off our starboard side and came over to say hello. It was just a little guy but IT WAS SO COOL. That´s pretty much all the new news around here for now, we are flying 5 sails right now but I imagine once Hans(the owner) wakes up that he will want us to go back up with the spinnaker so we´ll see.

Cheers,

ANDREW