Skippers log #48
35 18s 10 19e at 19:30 with 410 nm left & 161 nm in last 24 hrs. I have been plotting latitude and longitude coordinates on my electronic chart system, setting up target points based on my current speed and course. These targets are set up as part of my speed and distance calculations based on a projected lunch time Tuesday arrival. Math is now critical to me so that I can coordinate my sleep with my progress and when I project getting into shipping and fishing fleets. If I need this knowledge, gained from school, then our students need it too. My geography is critical now with the next few days. The two most dangerous times on each leg is departing the coast, and arriving on the coast. This is where alertness now is so important, and the reading of my weather. Sleep will become a luxury from tomorrow. I will be hard pushed to have a late lunch ashore, but all I can do is hope my weather cooperates and that I can keep the boat speed up. During the day I have been helming trying to increase my average speed so that there is some distance in the bank, and with 68 hours left, it is hard work. Already I have had an inquiry from Ken Willingham, asking if OL Thompson's Hatteras 45 will be suitable to tow my 60 footer to the 2002 start line. OL has towed me to the last two round the world starts. The power of positive thought is contagous. With the tow boat arranged, that's one more piece of this big puzzle in place. Just need the most important peices still - the sponsors. But they will come. First I have to finish what I am doing. This evening's dinner was the leftovers of last nights pasta. While helming today, dolphins played around the boat, and an albatross circled. Its wing span was nearly as tall as I am. It just glided so gracefully. It was cold on deck. I wore my Guy Cotten fowl weather suit, and stayed somewhat warm with 4 layers of clothes beneath, but with only my Sperry Topsider shoes and one pair of socks, my feet froze. I can't imagine what it must be like on Mt. Everest where one gets frostbite. This was warm by comparison. I wonder how Bartholamew Diaz and his crew kept warm when they became the first people documented to round the Cape of Good Hope. Can anyone tell me what year that was?
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Skippers log #49
34 49s 13 08e @ 18:30 GMT with 269 nm to go, covering 131 nm last 24 hours. My hopes of a late lunch ashore were dashed this morning at dawn when I was becalmed for 5 hours, drifting rather than sailing. I tried to helm, but there was little to nothing to go on. Eventually I managed to set a spinnaker for a while. I could have used my bow sprit today. It would have helped having flown the light spinnaker, but still it would not have bought me the 30 miles I have lost. I am closer to 40 miles behind my time line as the winds have been light all day, and only just in the last few hours has my speed increased about 5 knots, but my heading is not great. I am sailing closer to the wind than I want to. If I fall off onto course, I lose boat speed so badly. So I am heading for Cape Agulas, and hoping tomorrow to pick up SE wind which will bring me around. Fortunately I am able to keep a handle on the frustration meter. I usually run the engine every second or third day to charge batteries, but knowing that the demands on my power till the finish will be huge, the last three days I have run the engine everyday to try and keep the charge up. I have started to notice some oiliness in the bilge water, and I think I have found the reason I have been seasick. There must be some fuel dripping and maybe even some exhaust fumes getting into the cabin. So I better pay attention or else carbon monoxide poisoning could get the better of me. Servicing the engine is top of my 38 item job list, followed by fix bow sprit, replace halyard winches, sort out electronics, computer charging, chems in rudder stock, fix broken staysail sheave, send sails to North Sail loft to be checked and repaired, fix autopilot, replace some halyards, gas, fuel and provisions. These are the major jobs, the rest are really small like put bungy cord on hatch cover, dry out bunks, etc. The 39th job is a huge one. I hope that I can manage it, and probably will need a lot of help. It is...HAVE FUN. I fixed a big pot of potatoes for dinner. Soon I will eat at my three favorite Cape Town places. Two are complete holes in the wall, one is real nice, but none are expensive. One of my last favorite meals I had was at the Hobcaw Yacht Club party, eating Frogmore Stew, which is shrimp, potatoes, corn and sausage cooked together. HCY sure knows how to throw a good party and send us sailors away happy. Now the question is... will it be dinner Tuesday night, or breakfast Wednesday morning. I will let you know tomorrow night.
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Skippers log #50
34 29s 16 22e at 18:15 GMT 109 miles to CT
I can taste the ice cream. In about 18 hours time I will be ashore. It has been a great race. I can't wait to hold my nephew and to meet my brother in law, see my parents and sister, and be with old friends. It has been a number of years. Then on Saturday Gwen will be with me. I had the last Gwen curry tonight. I am driving. It is blowing quite hard and I am pushing the boat. I will not get any sleep tonight as I enter the shipping lanes. I plan to post the finish details sometime tomorrow afternoon, from shore. I estimate a late lunch local time arrival. I want to say thank you to all my sponsors, Phillips Industrial Services, SC Ports, Prudential, News Printing Company, Passport International, St. John's Rotary Club, Thompson Construction and Trucking, Spinlock, The Source and FastSigns for their support, and the many, many individuals who have helped make this possible. I want to say a special thank you to Bob and Diane Woodruff who have been doing the daily e-mails, Dallas Moore from Common Sense Solutions who handles the website, and the team in the Race Operations Center who watch over us. Then there is Gwen. No words can say what she means to me and this Foundation. With out her, I would not have sailed. She is my nuclear engine. Tommorrow's e-mail will not be so rushed. I have to get back helming.
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Skippers log #51
The local radio station that I grew up listening to is coming through clearly. They still playing music that I remember from my youth. Table Mountain and the mountains down to the Cape of Good Hope are in sight. Pre-dawn I saw the hugh of the lights and at sunrise, there was the mountain. This brought back a flood of memories. It was along this very shore that as a child I grew up, looking seaward at the yachts in the Atlantic, then as a young sailor, dreamt of crossing the ocean, and some day doing an around the world race. The same seals are playing in the Atlantic swells, clapping their flippers together. On my horizon seaward, the tankers which have rounded the Cape from the Indian Ocean head northward and westward for distant shore, and inshore, the fishing fleet is still trying to eak out a living, still transverse. It was here that great dreams were dreamt. Now I am back, a grown man who has lived his childhood dreams. I have mixed feelings of joy and sadness. These shores gave me so much. I have made 10 Atlantic crossings, now my eleventh, ten in this boat. This is the eigth time I represent South Africa in international short-handed events. I should be feeling immense joy. In just a mere few hours, I will be ashore eating icecream and should be celebrating another victory, but I feel reflective. For the first time in 6 years, Gwen is not on the finish line waiting. I don't know if I can live here, if I fit in to the community that I left. So much has changed. South Africa has paid a huge price for freedon, that for 14 years I have know traveling abroad. I feel peace in my soul, detached from the out come of this leg, at this moment. I just wish that the joy that I should be feeling, could be felt by a nation that was my home, that the hunger and poverty my country faces, could be removed. I am at home in Charleston, but don't fully belong. I am at home in Ireland, where I fit in best, but mostly, I am at home at sea. I have never had a voyage like this one, and never felt at peace with my surroundings as I did during the last 52 days. Now that will all change with the attention and the demands ashore. I have duties to perform, expections to live up to. Out here, nothing but survival matters. There is such basics out here, basics that we have forgotten. Something in me changed during this leg, and I don't know what that change is.
