Day 3 - Second Day of Training and Sailing

Me in the pit, and a hard day as we did a quite a few sail changes and manoeuvres, blew the asymmetric spinnaker, and got to find out what was not all that great with the boat… pretty much everything! Sunny and windy day, 3m swell as we went a bit further out of the heads and round the coast towards Bondi.

Its all a bit all over the place at the moment, not exactly a slick racing machine, but that is to be expected from such a mixed bunch of experience and a new crew working together. Average age of crew is nearly 50 I guess (or well it feels that way as most of the crew are late 40’s to mid 50’s)…

The boat is also kind of showing its age and the number of races done I think… quite a few repairs but shouldn’t be an issue and everything should be ok for the race. Just need to work around the little problems in the pit (one dodgy winch, dodgy winch handles, faulty clutches, one cross winch runner that is coming off the deck… not much really!)….

After a few days with the crew well lets just say… they certainly seem laid back and not too bothered. As ever until you get to know each other it is chaos on board… So far no camaraderie, really it’s a funny bunch. Nice people and everything, but no sense of being a single unit. There are small groups of people getting along but no real feeling of team or family and out of the whole group there really isn’t s a single person that I have bonded with. And to be honest a good few that are doing my head in badly rude, sexist, ignorant or just plain annoying!!

There are already people I don’t want to be on watch with but we shall see but one plus is that the skipper and first mate are great, really like the teaching and approach and hopefully it should get the best out of everyone. We have a great Bowman in Ben (the younger!) too which is good…. H is also great in the pit, although has a tendency to get sick apparently…. she was talking to the low side yet again today!! No idea how she survived clipper round the world (11 months at sea… !) what an achievement.

I know that you can’t always get on with everyone but I am thinking that this is going to be a long few days….. and that I will have a sense of achievement and fulfilment in completing the race but won’t have made any friends.