Wow so I just found this unfinished blog on my phone from leg 4 Fremantle to Airlie Beach! I thought I’d post it as a reminder of some epic times. The intro is ironic; when writing this I would never have guessed that only a couple of months later a virus would have brought the western world to a standstill and we would all have our lives on hold, confined to the four walls of our homes, only able to exercise once a day and unable to meet friends and family. How times have changed in the last few months!
“End of 2019!
What a year! I would never have thought this time last year (as I drove merrily on my way to a 4am colic on New Year’s Day) that I would be on a sailing yacht, racing through the Southern Ocean round the bottom corner of Tasmania!
We have now been on the boat for 4 months, so are over a third of the way round. Once we pass Tasmania, then the course from there will be northbound for the next 3 months, until we set sail across the mighty Pacific!
Christmas on board was a bit different to normal, with our new boat family, rather than my nearest and dearest at home. The day started with a beautiful sunrise and some nice champagne sailing. Ian, Giando and I embarked upon creating Christmas lunch for the crew. We roasted carrots and parsnips (which many of the non brits had never heard of!) and had mash, gravy, stuffing, sprouts with bacon and of course the all important turkey! We cooked two turkey rolls (the oven on board wouldn’t fit a bird big enough to feed 17) and then roasted the veg after. Dan was very disappointed to find that we had lost the cranberry sauce- it was there when we left Aldi but despite searching multiple dry bags of condiments and every cave locker, Christmas was only slightly dampened by no sauce! (The sauce turned up two days later in the cool box, doh!)
We served it up on deck, only slightly late after an impromptu yankee 1 drop and flake and hoist yankee 2! Then followed with Stollen and secret Santa organised by Susie. I got a winner with some celebrations, ginger beer and worthers originals, some got gloves or fun things like sunglasses or a silly koala face mask!
We have been pushing the kites hard. Rich, our new skipper is a great teacher and he has pushed us, in particular to really improving our helming skills with the kite up. In his own words we “dialled it up to 11” after the first few days once the dreaded upwind “bash” was over and we could ease the sails for some nice beam reaching. We first hoisted the kite in 25 knots of breeze in the dead of night- a brave move with a crew you just met and haven’t sailed with but it all went smoothly and then we were off to catch the rest of the pack who had chosen to stay close to the shore.
We had a few kite mares- getting the code 3 down in 38knots after a cold front passed over was a particular challenge: after the halyard was cut and the kite was fished from the sea our skipper commented that “you haven’t seen a bad kite drop until you have pulled it in over the A frame at the back”… it’s like he was predicting the future, as 2 days later (on New Years Day to be exact) when everyone at home was celebrating midnight, it was 10am on the boat and the whole crew (except one- more on that later) was on deck to heave our poor code 2 out of the sea, you guessed it, over the A frame!
We rounded Tasmania a couple of days into the new year. A milestone for everyone as the furthest South we will go on the whole journey, around 44 degrees South!
Sadly from then onwards the wind became a bit fickle. We elected to sail offshore to avoid the East Australian Current, a powerful stream of water travelling southbound down the east coast. This proved to be a good move in the long run, to start with the wind was much stronger by the coast and other boats made much better progress. Eventually their wind ran out and we made some good gains on the fleet- some boats even drifted backwards on the current when the wind ran out at night!
Some of the boats close to shore reported smog and ash blowing around on deck from the wildfires occurring in NSW at the time, we only had some slight haze and some stunning red to burning orange sunsets. Only once we got to Airlie were we aware of the extent of the damage to livelihood, wildlife and their habitats, a real eye opener to climate change!
Eventually we made it to the northeasterly trades and started to make some progress, although this was short lived and it felt like we crawled the final few hundred miles to Airlie beach. The light winds allowed the big red boat to catch up with us and slowly claw their way ahead…..”
Unfortunately this is where the blog ended and I feel it would be an injustice to try and finish it retrospectively. Sadly we finished about an hour after Qingdao in 6th place (5th at the time but Unicef got a place on elapsed time) however we had some fabulous learning experiences and were ready for a nice break in Airlie Beach.
Rachel's Race around the World 