by Ryan Godfrey (bowman)
A bit of relief aboard today as we finally have Puma bearing north of 270 degrees meaning that we are once again the southernmost boat in the fleet.
There is still a substantial east/west separation between us so things could rapidly change, but it is a nice feeling to be clear of the Fiji islands and back in the race lead after all our hard work in the early part of the leg.
Speaking of the leg, we recently just passed the 8000nm to go point. It’s funny to hear the guys saying 'only 8000 to go'. Our minds must be bending a little out here as 8000nm is still a bloody long way to go. The breeze is still pretty light and I suspect that we are falling behind all our earlier routing runs. One upside of this is that I am now secretly confident that my Cape Horn ETA bet is looking good, as it is one of the later dates.
Everyone is pretty relaxed at the moment as the breeze has settled and we are just happily rolling along on our endless port tack reach. Boatspeed a healthy 14kts. We are only changing sails every four hours or so. Although of late it does feel like that four hour interval is falling exactly into the middle of my off watch. Which is rather disappointing.
One new sport which is sweeping the team is pea throwing - yes you heard me right - pea throwing. We have an abundance of what we thought were wasabi coated peas - but something was lost in our Chinese and we ended up with peas covered in an unknown and flavourless coating. So we have taken to see who can throw one and get it through the mainsail clew ring (30mm) from a distance of four metres - harder than it sounds as the apparent wind has to be taken into consideration, only one through to date and that was Brad (Brad Jackson) - but there is some doubt if it went through as he claims it did!
Hope everyone is happy and safe ashore and see you in three weeks, or maybe more!
Volvo Ocean Race
Monday, 2 March 2009
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