Birthday Funday!

Birthday Funday!

Aha, we are in the early hours of Sunday again! The day
of rest…but I fear that there is no rest for our lot, the winds have returned
and with them we are back speeding along at 8-10 knots, the sea whistling down
the side of our cabins and the dynamo on the prop shaft squealing with every
wave we ride down. Our sails are reset into gale mode; the main is back down to
its second reef, the storm jib is back out and with the forecast looking windy
for the next week it’s probably going to stay that way. we are agreed however
that it is a nice feeling being reefed down – there is comfort to be found in
knowing that all we have to do now is take the wind and the swell, steer true
(with a lot of intense concentration faces) and we will come out the other side
having taken huge chunks out of our ‘miles to go’.

With Sunday comes the
cheeky once-a-week beer treat, but yesterday’s readers will already know that
ahaha we have been cheeky indeed and Saturday has already broken the week’s
booze fast! Waking up this morning the red watch came on deck to find Emmanuel
from the blue unloading a bag full of goodies…beer bottles and a bottle of
champagne for the birthday Captain Gijs! we toasted in the dark and continued,
slightly giggly, through our watch. The celebrations did not end there! The aft
cabin is covered in birthday decorations, we had hotdogs for lunch and pork ribs
for dinner, most of us have eaten our body weight in chocolate birthday cake (we
fought to take turns on the winches this afternoon to try and redeem our greedy
selves!) and there was another beer treat at dinner too! Birthday’s are the best
excuse! As it’s the end of the week the weekly newsletter update with the other
ships is due. we hear from our nightly communication schedule that they are also
flying along in this breeze. Linda has spent the day preparing the newsletter
which is probably just as difficult as finding things to write about in the
logbook – the days fly by and whilst the small things that change are hugely
exciting to us (like pancakes for breakfast, shower hopping and Game of Thrones
viewing) they definitely aren’t the most gripping story lines ever…”Frenchman
searching for camera lens finds woman in bathroom wrestling with flying
shower gel bottle”…”Man looses pork rib in deck fall and launches egg at
laughing offspring”…

In other news…we have become incredibly fond of
our Albatross stalkers. With each day comes different breeds – eyebrowtross,
tiggertross and MEGAtross (the great wandering Albatross) to name just a few.
They are magnificent to watch as they soar around us, fighting the wind that
flows out of the sails and getting closer and closer to the aft deck. White
watch even had one nearly attempt to land a few times but in the end settled
with sitting on our wash…probably a good thing as, as they fly closer and
closer, we realise just how big they are! No one wants to be crushed by a giant
bird at 5am…least of all slightly cold and slightly sleepy sailors! Soon we
will be swamped with the amount of pictures we now have of these amazing birds –
already there is talk of a picture show, but for now we are happy pointing and
shouting 100’s of different versions of our Albatross names – there are the only
company we have in these lonely seas and we’re very fond of their presence
(though what they think of us is probably a different matter!)

With love, the Redatross watch

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