Leg 7 had us setting out of Seattle on April 28th. After motoring out of the channel from Seattle, we had a brief refresher sail for the newbies and then waited for the race to start at 3:30 PM. It would be another Le Manns start since we were far away from where any of the other clipper boats could officiate. Unfortunately, Ichorcoal and Telemed, both had issues with their boat, which caused a delay to the start time, Ichorcoal eventually fixed their issue, but we waited and waited for Telemed and eventually just started without them at around 8 PM. When the countdown stopped, we somehow missed that the race had started and thought we had a minute left, so were a little late to get in position to hoist our head sails and ended up last out of the fleet. We monitored the other boats to see if they would fly a kite or switch to the bigger yankee 1 sail. Yankee 1 it was and eventually we made the switch as well. We were still in last but as the night went on, we were making up ground and started overtaking boats, not by much but we were coming up from behind.
I have never on the boat been this tired at the beginning of a race, so after motoring out and barely getting any sleep, I was out after our night watch, which was from 10 PM to 2 AM, meaning we then get to sleep from 2 AM to 6 AM. When Karri came to wake me at 5:15 for our 6 AM watch, I was so out of it. At some point shortly after, not sure, Alex came by telling me that I was mother that day and therefore I didn't have to WAKE UP...this was the only time I have ever been happy to be mother! I had a brief conversation with Ana, who I am sharing a bunk with about sleeping arrangements and then was passed out again within minutes. Amancio woke me up again around 9 AM to start mother duties, although I could have slept another twelve hours.
At this point, we had code 2 up and were in last place besides Telemed who started late. We are guessing this is due to us being the last one to hoist a kite, which is usually the case. After getting through lunch which was egg and bacon sandwiches with salad on the side, I was beyond knackered so finally decided to go lay down briefly. Mind you, I have never had a nap during mother watch, I usually am fine and can power through the day. So I went to lie down and again was out in seconds. Next thing I knew, people were getting dressed in the corridor but so was Ana, so I was slightly confused but I thought it was just because she was working with boiling water so was putting her foulie bottoms on. When I checked my watch, it was time for me to get up anyway and start helping with dinner. However, what I missed is that they had shouted down for all hands on deck, so when I came out to the galley everyone was getting ready. I quickly threw on my jacket and lifejacket and went up on deck. Turns out the donut blew on the head of the kite and we were now dragging the entire thing in the water. I went to the back of the boat to help drag it on board. Then once it was safely on board and seemingly undamaged, I helped Amancio retrieve the tack line and rig it back up so we could get code one up and flying. It only took us about fifteen minutes to retrieve the kite where we were bearing away in the wrong direction, so didn't lose too much distance and then another half hour getting the spinnaker halyard back down to hoist the next kite. Luckily, we didn't lose too much time all together and we should have been flying code 1 anyway, so got that sail change out of the way! After all that I was back down to help Ana with the rest of dinner, where we had beef patties, with fried potatoes, and roasted veggies...quite scrumptious if I do say so myself. Now I am snug in my bed and looking forward to a nice long snooze finally!
Monday, May 2nd
First of all, I must give a shout out to my sister and wish her a Happy Birthday today!!!
Sometime after I was on mother duty and before I made it back on deck the next day around noon, Tino managed to rip out one of the spinnaker blocks on the starboard side, taking out one of the stacions on the way. So we have now rigged another ring which is attached to the runner D-ring in place of the block and tied the stacion/guard rail on as best we could. We'll have to be a little more cautious on that side of the boat but otherwise in good shape.
Tino is on mother watch today, who is our watch leader for this race and I was appointed assistant watch leader, so today was my first go at leading the crew while he was asleep awaiting mother duties. Luckily, I have Amancio on this watch as well, so he can tell me what to do sailwise and I just make sure duties and logs get done and get Huw's opinion when needed...chicken no bone!
Since I've been back from mother duty, we've been fighting with no wind and trying to get out of last place which is no small feat with no wind. We've changed from code 2 to 1, then to windseeker this morning, where we dropped the kite on deck on wooled it, and then dropped the windseeker and hoisted yankee 1 and the staysail.
As for wild life matters, GB apparently saw an Orca whale, which is a killer whale. Awesome! And we saw a shark! Heck yes! Finally saw one. Maybe we will see more as we cross San Francisco. We are currently passing northern California. And then as we were having happy hour, a pod of dolphins came to play, which is nothing to note, except that half had no dorsal fins so we couldn't make out what they were at first. We'll have to do some research when we get to land to see what type they were. And in addition to that, we were pretty sure they were mating as we saw quite a few attached to one another. Unfortunately, no one had a gopro handy at the time to drop in the water.
Friday, May 6th
So we are now passing the middle of Baja California. For those of you not familiar with this region, Baja California is part of Mexico and not an extension of the states. We have had some good steady winds and keeping up with a few other boats, including Unicef and GBR. Although, in the last day or so, we gybed back out and GB followed, so now it is just us in front with GB tailing us and PSP a bit of ways behind GB. The other boats are spread out pretty much in the same cluster along a parallel line just east of us and closer to shore. We are currently ranked 8th since we are further away from the target where the office measures the distance to finish from, but all in all, we are doing quite good so far. We'll see what happens when the doldrums shake up the positions again with no wind.
I'm starting to get better at helming now, to the extent that Amancio even said that I did the best helm of the day yesterday! Unfortunately, right after he said that, I collapsed the kite, the sheets got a riding turn on them around the winch and then I couldn't hold the kite up since the sheets were in too tight, therefore leading me to wrap the kite on the wrap net. We luckily got it fixed with supposedly no holes that Tino could see right away. But when the other watch went up, they saw two small holes in the kite. The other watch dropped the code 2 and hoisted code 3. Karri set to patch the holes and by the time I was up for my night shift, I took over and sewed the patches on. Then we finished wooling and rehoisted the code 2 over the watch change. However, today when I was on watch, I noticed there was another hole next to the other patches. Since it is close to a seam, we are going to leave it and get it repaired once we are ready to change kites. We also noticed a lot of areas where the sun is shining through at the head of the kite and along the luff line. So either there are a million little holes or more probable is that the kite is just really worn there from flogging the sail so much.
Monday, May 9th
The weekend came and went along with the wind. We've been struggling to get wind since yesterday, going between code 1, yankee 1, and windseeker. The wind finally started to pick up slightly today when we had the windseeker up, so we dropped it and hoisted the yankee 1. Then the wind shifted and we dropped the yankee and hoisted code 1. However, we hoisted it with the light weight sheets, so we decided to change one of the sheets for a heavy weight one which is used for stronger winds. In order to do this while the kite is flying, you have to send someone out to the clew of the kite, which is done by hoisting them on the spare halyards and using the lazy spinnaker sheet to pull themselves out towards the clew. We don't do much of these type of changes on our boat and the last time I recall this being done was in Leg 1 when we sent John up to fix the knotted sheets. Tino and I had just been discussing it the other day and I was saying how that would be fun to go out there to do it. As such, I was nominated for the job and got sent flying out to the clew!
It seems quite simple when you think about it. I have the heavy weight sheet attached to my harness, so all I have to do is tie on the new sheet to the strops at the end of the clew and then return back down. However, once I made my way up there, I found it required a lot of upper body strength simply to stay in place as you are swaying back and forth with the kite. Once out there, I had a separate tether to clip onto the active sheet, so I didn't have to hold on to that one, but I should have clipped on to the bowline of where the sheet meets the clew. Instead, I was moving up and down the sheet, requiring me to use more arm muscles then needed. Once I was clipped on, I simply had to pass the heavy weight through the strop...well the loop at the end of the strop is about big enough for two fingers to pass through, so adding a third line while the strop was under pressure and pulling the loops tight was proving to be no easy task.
After several minutes of fighting with the loops, we decided to lose the lazy sheet to make more room for the new sheet to pass through. After that was done, I barely managed to get the new sheet through one of the two strops. We decided to give up on the second one after several more attempts and just pass the sheet through the the bowline of the active sheet as an extra precaution. Then I had to tie a bowline upside down, literally, as I was horizontal and my feet would occasionally be lifted over me. After that, I had to untie the sail tie we used to attach the sheet to me as I went up. All of these insignificant tasks were a thousand times harder when I had no strength left in my arms and could barely lift them anymore. But after fifteen minutes up in the air, all was done and I went back down on the new lazy heavy weight sheet which I attached. I then proceeded to pass out on the deck as I waited for movement in my arms to return. I've decided I can pass on the arm and abs workout on this evening's watch and just focus on legs. We'll see if I am able to function tomorrow on mother duty...I may be cooking with my feet. And after all was said and done, Mia somehow managed to snap one hundred and eleven photos of the swap.
In other news, it looks like the rest of the fleet besides DaNang, who is far west with us, is maintaining speed and quickly gaining on our southern position. The other boats are still very much in the lead since they are further east and therefore, much closer to the finish lines, but we were hoping to get better wind out here and then come back in at a good angle and meet them close to the first finish line. But, of course, with our eternal luck on this boat, the wind forecast has been wrong again and we have less wind then predicted and the wrong angle. But when you aren't moving, there isn't much of an angle to sail off of anyway. So finger's crossed, this wind picks up soon and dies inland.
Otherwise, we've just been keeping busy on the boat and taking opportunity of the flat conditions to get some work done, like make more sail ties, redo the spinnaker block spectra that was melting, fix the bobstay strops, fix the wrap net, fix the pipes in the heads...oh that reminds me...Tino went to check out a leak in the forward heads and came to find that the black tank, the tank where everything that goes into the toilets passes, had been switched to the holding position while we were in port and no one had switched them back. That means we've been sailing for about a week and a half now collecting the shit of twenty people. Safe to say, it took Tino and Vernon a good while to pump through everything that was in the tanks...oh so many fun things of living on a boat.
That makes me remember that when my family was in town during our Seattle stopover, my sister and family commented that they realized what I was doing was certainly a challenge but they had a new appreciation of what I was doing after they got a tour of the boat and where I've been living the past eight months. Now that I am back on the boat, it just seems like home to me. In fact, when I was on deck either last night or the night before, I remember making the comment during our night watch, okay, it is time to go home, after our watch was over, simply meaning, it was time to go down to bed. I am so used to living on the boat now, everything is just second nature. Granted, we've been pretty much downwind sailing this entire leg so far, so that makes living on a boat a thousand times easier as the boat is much flatter and not heeled over for the most part. I was even remarking how flat the boat was the other day and that I could walk in the galley without holding the walls and then I even broke out into my gangster walk for everyone since I could use both hands for a proper strut, along with my famous "LA Mexican" lingo.
Then again, everything seems about ten times easier on the boat after crossing the Pacific. For one the boat is dry, at least at the moment, which is maybe the biggest plus. Going from a wet bunk, to wet foulies, to a wet deck might be the worst thing to have to endure on the boat. But, we'll see if I'm singing the same tune once the heat really kicks in a few days from now. Besides that, it takes half or even a quarter of the time to get ready, since you can literally roll out of bed in your T-shirt and shorts, throw foulie bottoms on or just a life jacket and you are good to go. I also stocked up on all my favorite American food snacks, so I have comfort food at every corner...also possibly why I've been trying to work out more on deck now. I can even work out on deck again and am not limited to certain exercises or areas of the boat where I'll be tossed overboard by a wave. Oh, and we can shower again because it is warm enough...so many pluses!
But, at the same time, I do still live on a boat...I have to manually pump my shit down a toilet; I have to clean the heads, antiback the walls, pump grey tanks, and sponge out the bilges for water...I wash dishes with salt water; I have to scoop water out of the sink because the drain is on the wrong side; I have to use a foot pump to access any water; I eat out of dog bowls so they don't slip when I set them down; I eat off my lap, not a table; I only get fresh fruit for two weeks at a time; I eat dehydrated meat and veg...I wear the same clothes for at least a week at a time without a proper shower; I have to wear smelly, moldy foulies; I clean myself with wet wipes or if I'm lucky, wash with salt water out of a bucket; I get to dust myself with baby powder so I don't end up with rashes in odd places...I live on a thirty to forty-five degree angle about fifty percent of the time; I occasionally have to climb a wall to get into bed; I sleep wedged up next to a wall or a leecloth; I sleep in a sleeping bag or with sheets dampened from sweat that cannot be washed; I wake up randomly to adjust the height of my bed so I don't fall out; my bed is occupied by someone else when I am not in it; I wake up every four to six hours and then stay awake for four to six hours, never getting a decent nights sleep except for maybe about every ten days or so; I can only use red light at night; I can't go outside without lugging a five pound floaty around my neck; I have to strap down to a new spot about every five steps when outside...I get to lift heavy ass sails and walk them back and forth and up and down through hatches; getting sprayed in the face with salt water while in conversation is standard; I must be prepared to get wet at a moment's notice either through rain or waves...and I have physically aged my face and hands by about ten years through sun, salt, and rope work; I also have no idea what is going on in the world around me and miss out on important life events; I am stuck in a confined space with around 20 other people and ABSOLUTELY no privacy...and pirates are a REAL threat!
And yet, I can still say I LOVE the experience...I get to star gaze at the clearest skies; I have seen the most magnificent sunrises, sunsets, and rainbows; I've seen dolphins of every shape and size and also whales and sharks out in the wild; I live in the outdoors, on the ocean; at times, the most peaceful and quietest settings imaginable...I get to play on the bow; I get to watch kites burst and fly into huge balloons; I can tie a bowline with my eyes shut (thanks Quentin!); I get to surf down the biggest waves you could ever imagine; I have seen the ocean surface majestically flat with no ripples for miles; I've swam in the most remote places and showered under the warm rainfall of a thunder storm...I can escape from everything without a care in the world; I lead a simply life, "eat, sleep, sail, repeat"...I have the best victualer of the fleet who feeds us amazing meals; I have a fun and goofy skipper who let's me be me; I get to dance and sing at the top of my lungs without too much disapproval; I never have to worry about what I look like; and best of all, I get to share this experience with other extraordinary people, my crew on Visit Seattle, who inspire me to think outside of the box, or just think in general at times...they share their stories with me and let me probe with my forty questions; I may travel the world forever seeking the fun and adventure they have told me about from their own experiences...and I know there will always be a couch for me to crash on when I come to visit these new and lifelong friends who have endured this amazing and unforgettable experience with me.
Tuesday, May 17th
It's been a good week since I last wrote and really not that much has happened. We are now in the doldrums and if you recall, that means no wind, flat water, no movement, and mad amounts of heat. But, one of the more eventful things that has happened is the ocean sprint. As we came up to it, it looked as though we would have favorable winds and could make a shorter line than the rest of the fleet. We decided to go for it even though it meant we would lose some distance to the finish line in the end. Well luck was finally on our side and we smashed the sprint compared to the other boats finishing it in just ten hours and one minute. Max on PSP ended up getting stuck in a wind hole during the sprint and it took him fifty two hours to finish. Another boat nearby who saw him bobbing around for days, radioed him up because they thought he was in distress. When they found out Max was participating in an ocean race, they just laughed in response. Amazing.
In other exciting boat news, LMAX caught a fish. I am intrigued by this and have so many questions. Who beat the fish over the head, descaled it and filleted it? I've always wanted to catch a fish on our boat but Tino says someone has to do those things, so then it sounds a bit less appealing in the end.
We also happened to pass a boat for the first time in weeks the other night. We saw a light in the distance and at first couldn't make out if it was a star or a boat. There was nothing on AIS, so we just kept a close eye on it, eventually it crossed our bow and suddenly appeared on AIS. They must have seen us and switched it on. As for us, our tricolor lights at the top of our boat are out, so we've been using the anchor light, which is misleading to other boats in the night. So we ended up turning our navigational lights on at our bow so they could at least make out what direction we were going. Always fun running into a random boat in the middle of the vast ocean!
In other news, we've seen more wild life, including lots of dolphins, a turtle, and a bird even came to rest at our bow today. I'm pretty sure it was about to attack me as I came closer to take pictures of it. We've been going through all kinds of musical selections, including stories about the history of the gods and my disney and musicals playlists. Actually, that reminds me, Ralph, our sponsor, so kindly bought us an assortment of chocolate covered cherries to bring on board to be eaten for a celebration or a morale pick me up. We ended up eating them after we heard about our results of the ocean sprint and I may have had one too many and ended up on a sugar high, resulting in me doing renditions of musicals on deck during our first night watch. I think it is safe to say the off watch didn't get much sleep during my little performance...
As we've just been bobbing around now, we started doing deck cleans every morning, washing down the deck with our water pump. We were in the middle of a mini deep clean the other day, cleaning floor boards, bilges and going through random bags that were stored in the bilges, when we came across a bag filled with Cokes and Sprites! What a delight! Unfortunately, because of the hot conditions, a lot of them evaporated. As we were going through the good and bad ones, we gave Mia a bag of bad ones to toss overboard, which she happily took and immediately tossed over the side without thinking twice. The part she forgot was to take the cans out of the trash bag which is nAt supposed to go in the ocean! We got a good laugh out of this and Mia felt horrible for tossing plastic into the ocean.
We have also rigged the water pump as an awesome outdoor shower head through the A-frame so the afternoon watch can all take showers easily every afternoon before heading back below into the sauna. However, it is now hard to get any sleep below deck as it is so hot. If you manage to fall asleep, you wake up in a pool of sweat. As such, we've all turned into zombies during our watches and there are bodies everywhere on deck sprawled out.
Our amazing outdoor shower! With Tino controlling the pump.
Today we gave out nicknames to everyone who didn't have one yet. These included Buttercup for Lucy, Koala for Jon who sleeps curled up on deck, Bubbles for Mia as she is bubbly all the time, Vern Diggity Dog for Vernon, and "the Shiz" for Nicki, and we've adopted "the General" for Alex until we find another one. Lucy's buttercup was named because one morning we found her licking a peanut butter cup off the wrapper which it had melted to...amazing! If you couldn't tell, I came up with Lucy's, Vernon's and Nicki's nicknames. We were trying to come up with something German for Nicki, but since I couldn't pronounce anything correctly, I just ended up with "shiz" after trying to say schnitzel and it turns out "shiz" (probably spelled incorrectly here) means "shit" in German, so unbeknownst to me, we nicknamed him, "the Shit". I love it. [Update: Nicki eventually got a new nickname, "Germany", which I approve.]
There is one more thing that I'll mention that has happened in the last week. As mentioned previously, I did some extensive food shopping while in Seattle to introduce my crew mates to some of the great American classics. One of which, are the oh so delicious and processed Chewy Chocolate Chips Ahoy. If you are unaware, the British like their cookies or "biscuits" dry and crunchy. So the chewy version of a cookie is not preferred and I ended up banning them from eating the cookies I brought to share because they kept referring to them as 'soggy'. What the hell! On the other hand, Tino introduced me to putting peanut butter on the these cookies, which is actually quite amazing, so you should all try that at home. Enjoy!
As I write this, we are sitting out on deck during our 0200 - 0600 night shift and we just saw a green distress light in the distance. None of us are really aware of what a green distress light means and to be fair, only one person thought it was green and the other person who saw it didn't make out a color. So now we are on the lookout for any more "distress" signals. At least it was a little excitement for our night watch.
Sunday, May 22nd
Well another few days have passed and since then they have called the race and we all began to motor towards Panama. We ended up with tenth position with PSP and DaNang behind us. Mission was only a few miles in front of us but we were not able to catch them in time. Now the race office has split up the boats in three groups of four. We are with the three boats just mentioned and up until last night, we were just dawdling along waiting for DaNang to catch up with us.
To pass the time, I took loads of photos of the millions of birds that decided to land on our bow...I think we counted eight at one time being the most. Then yesterday, we brought the three boats, PSP, Mission and ourselves, somewhat close together, cut the engines and then met up for a swim. Our boat was in the middle and we were the last to get ready to swim, so by then, Mission had already swam over and climbed aboard. Before long, we were all in the water swimming over to PSP who met us in the middle. We happily treaded water for a bit and a few headed all the way over to PSP but when we saw how far we were drifting from our boat, the rest of us decided to head back. Safe to say, I didn't need to work out afterwards and got a good workout trying to make my way back to the boat!
I thought these pics were great...oddly looking like someone painted them with a little filter action!
The hoard of birds huddled together on the bow at night.
We continued swimming nearby our boat for a bit and a few jumped in and cleaned the water line of the boat, which is the side of the boat where the boat rests on the water. It gets quite murky. While they were busy at work, we had an inquisitive turtle swim by and start playing with the fender we had dragging behind the boat and then it came closer to play with our scramble net. I didn't like that part one bit as I was afraid it was going to get stuck in the net, which it pretty much did for a few minutes. Once it freed itself, we pulled the scramble net up so it couldn't get stuck anymore. Ana, who was the last one in the water, had to wait for the turtle to move on before she could come back on board...good thing she likes to swim! I stayed on the boat for the visit...as much as I wanted to swim with the turtle, it wasn't worth loosing an appendage over in case the turtle got snappy! Instead, Sweet Cheeks took one for the team and took a video of it underwater! Hopefully, some of the footage came out, but we won't know until we get time to recharge the camera battery which died shortly after.
Other than that, not much is going on. Just trying to survive the never ending heat. I swear each hot leg is hotter than the last but maybe I just forget how horrible the hot legs are after each race. I do know, as much as I hate the cold, I still prefer that to the heat which you cannot escape from.
We met up with Wendo last night and continued motoring until we all realized that we were all quickly running out of fuel. As such, we switched back to sailing this morning at 0600, hoisting the staysail, yankee 2 and sticking reef 2 in. And immediately we went from flat to 45 degrees again...oh the joys of upwind sailing! Since we are short on fuel, we will keep up the sailing for as long as the wind holds up and then once it dies, we will group together in twos and take turns towing one another to save fuel until we make it to Costa Rica to refuel, which should be in another day or two. Then we make a quick pitstop for a matter of hours and continue on our way to Panama.
Tuesday, May 4th
We have now started towing one another. DaNang and Mission have linked up and we are with PSP. We were towing PSP over the last day and then they were meant to tow us after we reached half way. Of course, last night when we went to make the switch, Max's engine decided not to work and turns out his gear shift is broken. As such, we topped up our tanks with the four remaining gerry cans we had onboard and continued to tow them until they could get their engine problem fixed. We had another go this morning, and they were able to manually put the engine in gear and are now towing us.
Today was one of the hottest days we've had in awhile. We still have no helm cover so in order to stay cool while on the helm, I had Tino and Huw working the water pump behind me and cooling me down occasionally with some sprays. We even added our wash bucket underneath and created a small swimming pool for me which I was able to sit in and helm at the same time.
Since our refueling time got pushed back a day, we decided to break from the heat and have another swim with everyone. This time the drift was a bit more, so we didn't get to swim with the other boats but just alongside each other so we didn't drift too far from our own boats. As I have either ditched or misplaced my pool ring, I decided to go in with the horseshoe raft as a floatation device which I tied on to the back of the boat so I wouldn't have to exert too much energy against the tide. As I was enjoying my easy drifting off the back of the boat, all of a sudden, I felt stings all over! There were jelly fish everywhere! Why did no one mention this to me. After I realized what it was, I was quick to try and tow myself back in towards the boat, which proved to be more difficult than it should of been with Tino hanging on to the line behind me. After I got out, I rubbed some posh vinegar on my stings, which is all we had on board but I luckily didn't get stung too badly.
Mission and DaNang next to us
A few fun shots, pretty sure those "bubbles" in the left, middle photo are the jellies attacking me!
Standard Tino
We are now hoping to reach Costa Rica in the early AM this morning and will be able to refuel around 7 AM. We've heard stories of a resort nearby and are hoping it might be open for breakfast or a quick Bloody Mary before we head back out...I better go below now as the biggest death cloud is looming in the distance and who knows what is about to go down...
Well the death cloud came and went and so did Costa Rica and Panama. We are now in the midst of the second race up to New York, but I'll try to remember the rest of the trip down to Panama...
We had an amazing sunset as we towed PSP to Costa Rica
It was around 3 AM when we arrived to our destination in Costa Rica. However, Mission and DaNang had sped ahead and scoped out the marina in advance and by doing so, were able to take the only two slips available to dock. Meaning PSP and ourselves just had to motor outside the marina until the next morning when they were done refueling. Now that wouldn't have been the most horrible news in the world considering we knew we couldn't refuel until 7 AM anyway, but what made matters worse is that Greg, skipper on Mission, was kind enough to inform us that the bar was still open and they were all enjoying some drinks...WTH! You couldn't just leave that portion out. Safe to say, we were an unhappy crew, minutes from land and cold drinks and yet we could do nothing about it, literally, as we were still being towed by PSP at this point.
I was on the 0200 - 0600 watch, so I decided, if they get to enjoy drinks, then we are going to enjoy some pancakes for breakfast instead. I made the crew pancakes so at least the blow wouldn't be so bad when they found out what happened. DaNang and Mission were finally done refueling around 10 AM and then we were allowed to come ashore. Meanwhile as we were waiting for them to be done in the morning, we get a phone call from the race office informing us that our pitstop needed to be as quick as possible for if we didn't make it to Panama in time on Friday to get measured, we would have to wait until Monday, which would delay the race start. So not only did we have to stay awake all night, we now had to expedite our stopover in Costa Rica. Mind you, we were supposed to stop in race order, so we should have been in front in DaNang but of course, when you are in the last lot no one seems to care about you anymore.
We finally make it into shore around 10, drop the lines and quickly get the refueling set up. Then we happily run up to the bar at marina with our phones and wallets and order as many beers as possible and attempt to crush the wifi, but per standard, wifi wasn't working. We did however, get to enjoy a few beers and order some "bilge burgers" and chips, guac, and salsa for me. At some point during this break, Patsy had gone to help Amancio carry some food that he bought down to the boat and managed to lose one of her crocs over the side and into the water. How the heck she managed to do this is anyone's guess. So Posh and I went down to help out. I saw it floating down past another group of boats, so I was hoping to jump on and reach out for it. But Patsy convinced Posh to jump in a dingy with her and she rowed them out to rescue the shoe, which they actually managed to do. I waited for them on the pontoon to grab their line when they came back. Mind you, these were Posh's crocs Patsy was wearing, so she had some skin in the game!
Finally arriving up to the marina!
Long line at the bar!
All in good spirits!
Team photo
After our brief little break, it was back on the boat for us and a quick, speedy motor over to Panama. We were in high spirits after our little break and both watches stayed up late to hang out and chow down on the fried chicken that Amancio had bought in town. The night watches were a bit rough with the lack of sleep but we eventually made our way in to Panama. Oh, the best thing I forgot to mention is that we stocked up on ice, juice, and sodas. So we had cold beverages for the next two days on the boat, which is one luxury we never get!
Having fun back on the boat...Buttercup so excited over watermelon and ice! And me eating my burger which also could have been the cause of my stomach issues later...
As I was using the heads, I had the genius idea of just going through the hatch rather then exiting the normal way...I totally fit! I now have a new exit route if the ship goes down!
We found this little gem in Costa Rica, which I stashed for a special someone...
The second night, Amancio made us these amazing grilled steak kabobs with potatoes and veggies on the side. Absolutely delicious with a real fruit salad for desert. Unfortunately, that night, a few of us started to feel a bit rough, getting really horrible stomach cramps. I, being one of them. I started feeling ill during the 0200 - 0600 watch and wasn't able to sleep at all during our off watch at 6. Whatever I had eventually worked its way through my system and I was spewing liquids at both ends...so lovely! Safe to say, that when we finally made it to Panama, I was stuck below trying to get my bearings. I missed the arrival and photos, but don't think I had much choice in the matter. Since we usually don't use the heads once we get in to port, I was stuck up at the marina so I could be close to the toilets whenever nature called. Definitely the best arrival I've had so far....nAt!
Coming into Panama
Nice shot of Sweet Cheeks from Clipper
Arrival into Panama photo which I missed
And random photos from the race...
Sunset photo with moon rising
Sunrise photo as we were passing some islands
Lazy day coming into Costa Rica
A poo bag which was thrown out and got stuck on the main
Karri making scrumptious food
Showering in the rain...Bam Bam's lifey went off
Jon, AKA Koala, getting ready to spike his first tack while battling the bird at the bow!
I am now the barber on the boat! Posh let me have a go as well!
Some shots from Mia's GoPro
Selfie!
Chilling on deck
