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Thye Great Inagua mystery

Visit Finland has been extending the lead during a light winded but very pleasant and sunny day near Cuba.

This morning we could see and smell the vegetation of Cuba. The wind brought a scent of wet woodland after a rain, grass and black compost. It was pleasant, green smell of land. We were bobbing in a light wind patch sometimes facing due south (that’s bad as we wanted to go north), but never mind – this way we could enjoy the proximity of land for a while. We saw Cuba and left with the wind.

Once again it has been a beautiful day out in the Caribbean. The forward accommodation hatch has been open for a day or two, finally there is lovely breeze down below airing the crew living area. We are steadily fine reaching in light winds, so the boat is flat and moving easy. At last gone are the days of defying the laws of gravity.

Wildlife void

There is very little wildlife around here to my surprise. I can see algae vegetation in the water and few sea birds, but apart from that there seems to be little else but plastic waste drifting in the water. It is sad to see how man-made rubbish ends up in the seas, polluting and spoiling it. It is really shameful for human species to be so arrogant and claim ownership of natural reserves we have no right to. We haven’t even outlived the length of time that dinosaurs ruled the earth, so what makes us so certain we will survive this self-destructive behaviour of disrespecting the natural environment? My view is that the Earth will survive and we humans will extinct sooner rather than later, and quite rightly so.

Speaking of ownership of land, whose territories are Little and Great Inagua islands? We have passed two islands to our starboard, but the chart does not indicate any country that they belong to. This geographical mystery has puzzled few of us by now.

I’m hearing great excitement about a fish up on deck, so better go and inspect what kind of sea creature has caught the lure. We like dolphin-friendly, line caught fresh tuna here aboard Visit Finland.

A bucket for fish going up on deck at 21 11 43N 074 26 40W

Beach party

Visit Finland is match racing with 5 Clipper yachts in sight of each other in approach to Scoring Gate.

Hurray, we are moving again! This morning our speed dropped from 11.5 knots to 2.0 kn within couple of hours when winds went light. We had most interesting morning watch dropping, hoisting and gybing a great variety of sails.

At 7am we, Brooklyn watch clambered on deck and saw New York just at our port quarter attempting to overtake us. Edinburgh was right behind them, DLL at port beam, Singers two miles ahead at port bow and Goldies at starboard bow. After rubbing sleepy eyes we also saw little specs in the horizon, Qingdao and Derry battling away in the distance. The leading pack had driven into light winds, and we had caught up with them during night watches.

Light wind wonders

We went through a whole wardrobe of sails from Yankee 2 to Y1, then to lightweight spinnaker, windseeker and then back to Y1. Staysail came down and went up later again, as the helm called wind shifts, changes in strength and other observable conditions. The trim team acted on helms calls, and rest of the crew actively sat on the low side being as heavy as possible. Once again I wonder what the racing rules would say about all crew wearing climbing harnesses and being dangled over the low side while holding two full buckets of water in their hands? We were trying to create artificial heeling in light winds, but unfortunately the chocolate diet does not offer instant crew fattening results.

In the morning we took two miles off Singers and made gains on other yachts too, so fingers crossed the wind continues to be steady for now. Scoring gate is less than 70 miles away, so who ever gets there first bags most points.

Queens watch took over at 1pm, and they have done stellar job keeping New York and Edinburgh at bay. Goldies have found a wind stream and Singers were seen disappearing to the port, obviously after more wind that direction.

Sugarscoop beach party

Sugarscoop has become my second favourite spot on the boat, especially on a hot, sunny and calm day like this. One can bring all the necessities for bathing there, and then just scoop sea water with a jug and take a lovely bath at the back of the boat! Obviously one has to be tethered and careful when reaching for water, but any normal sensible person knows that (enough babysitting).

I washed my hair, scrubbed all rancid suncream and dust off my skin – absolutely delightful! Even the beige combing (surface material) feels like sandpaper, so it’s not far off from an impression of a beach, honest.

Now I’m heading for a little after-beach nap, then we’ll get dinner and start an evening watch while sailing past Cuba and Hispaniola.

It’s lovely out here at 19 11 68N 074 28 28W

Caribbean style bath

Visit Finland and nine other yachts have yesterday started racing from Panama to New York.

Le Mans race starts are good fun. In this type of start all yachts line up motoring in steady speed and course, main sail hoisted and head sails ready to be hoisted. All crew need to be behind the coffee grinder winch four minutes before the start. The engine will be cut off one minute before the start. When the start signal goes off the crew moves forward and takes their designated positions, hoisting headsails like men and women possessed. During the first ten minutes of the race the yachts are not allowed any course changes, sail hoists or drops.

We were surprised to see Geraldton take such a good start and steady lead for the first 12 hours of the race, considering that they had trouble with their rigging still minutes before the start. The usual suspects are leading the pack: Goldies, Geraldton, Derry and DLL seem to be in front of us at the moment. Edinburgh is hot on our heels, perhaps their interim skipper Flavio has brought some new energy into the team.

Bathing

The wind is blowing from north, which is inconvenient as we are trying to sail towards that direction. It’s an upwind slog for us again, hatches closed and hot down below; wet, wet and wet up on deck. Headsail change this morning soaked everyone on deck, which was not great as some crew were feeling already very iffy because of heeling and bouncy movements of the boat.

Yes, the green monster of sea sickness has found it’s way to us again. It seems that only leggers are suffering at the moment, but that isn’t a surprise as the previous race was spent entirely in gently swinging boat downwind and under a spinnaker. This may have conditioned the new crew for a steadier ride than usual, while the old dogs have gone through North Pacific and these days probably cannot get sea sick in any conditions anymore. Lets hope that the spinnaker spell has not ended for good.

We are again wall climbing in the galley and operating one handed – one hand for your food/drink/job and the other for the boat. Sleeping in the hospital bunk requires steady faith in the leecloth, as the heeling angle cannot be adjusted and therefore the inhabitant is cupped into the side of the bunk, leaning against the leecloth with all weight.

We’re mothering with Thomas again, but fortunately the lunch menu is simply cup soup and bread. Simple and easy – therefore I can go and test the strength of my leecloth for couple of hours before boiling water for lunch.

Cheerio from West Atlantic Ocean, 12 54 23N 078 14 63W

Fresh food relief

Welcome to Yorkshire paid our fuel transfer favour in oranges, apples, sugar, salt and honey.

Kindness is paid with kindness. The monetary value of fuel is much higher than that of fresh fruit, however we very much appreciated the bagfuls of apples and oranges that the crew and skipper of WTY handed over after the fuel transfer. “What else do you need?” Hmmm, everything? After receiving all the goodies we didn’t dare to enquire whether they had any fresh coffee aboard.

Tuna steaks ahoy

A little fishing boat approached us in the afternoon, carrying three Americans and their fishing gear. They offered us a massive yellowfin tuna from their storage, which was full of all equally big and freshly caught tunas. It was such a friendly gesture from the fishermen, we were delighted! Now we had plenty of food (too much even) for us on Visit Finland, so we called Welcome to Yorkshire and rafted for an hour for some natter and fish transfer.

Ed did stellar job cleaning the tuna, and with thoroughness and precision of a medical doctor he also examined the contents of the stomach, the condition of the heart and what not. Then Carl halved the fish crudely with a hacksaw, which did work very well. The floor behind the helm was looking pretty grim afterwards, but few bucketfuls of water and a deck brush sorted that out.

We are now motoring towards Panama, and should reach our destination tomorrow late morning or early afternoon. We’ve been told that the drinks are in the cold already, and there’s a laundrette and wifi in the marina. What else we could possibly need for the few days ashore?

On night watch at 08.02.82N 079.44.15W

Fuel transfer fun

Visit Finland is now motoring with Welcome to Yorkshire, which caught up with us overnight for fuel transfer at dawn.

We have seen the port lights of WTY for couple of hours now, but the fuel transfer needs to take place during daylight. The pink lady has been motoring a long way from their offshore position, and therefore they now need top up from the other boats of the fleet.

Yesterday morning I was starting a pedicure after my watch, but suddenly Gregs hat appeared with numbered tickets in it. That could only mean one thing: The Deep Clean. Very reluctantly I moved my pedicure bucket away and immersed myself into a boat job of the most pleasant kind – floorboard scrubbing.

Deck action

During deep clean we lift all sails up on deck, followed by floorboards. Then multiple teams start cleaning bilges, wiping white surfaces, tidying up a navigation station, sorting out the galley and scrubbing floorboards. Usually on ports we also lift all cushions and mattresses for antibacterial treatment, and in addition cushion covers also need regular laundering.

The day was sunny and warm as usual, so I enjoyed the outdoorsy maintenance job with Daz, Thomas and Meg. We’re all getting a nice tan out here! (I know it’s unhealthy, but as a child of dark climate I cannot get enough of sunshine.)

Finally I managed to resume the pedicure after several hours of scrubbing, rinsing and carrying boards. I like to keep my nails painted – it makes me feel less blokey in this rather masculine environment. Many other women onboard agree – we’ve got a good range of nail polish colours stashed away.

Tuna sashimi

Skipper Oli had fishing luck today evening, when a fat tuna finally took the bait despite of our rather high boat speed. The tuna was hauled closed to the boat, and the guys tested a makeshift net that prevented the escape of the fish when lifted above the surface. A week ago a big dorado wiggled to freedom after being lifted from water. This was such a blow that Oli, Carl and Greg fashioned immediately a fishnet from two plastic hoops and netting intended for storing fruit. The net worked beautifully, so today we are going to have fresh tuna for lunch! Now I only wish we had sushi rice, vinegar and seaweed on board for making some tasty tuna maki rolls.

I think maki roll ingredients should be included in our victualling list in addition to sugar, salt, honey, jaycloths, washing up liquid, marmite etc. essentials. To my horror our cafetiere (aka French press) broke last week after a clumsy tumble, so we have been using the plunger in an almost-fitting water jug. The last swig of fresh coffee now leaves such quantity of coffee grounds between teeth, that one could assume we’re having a terrible caries problem here.

I shall include two more items into my essential sailing kit list: a little, personal coffee press and an emergency bag of dark and strong espresso.

Motoring with Yorkshire at 07.06.15N 081.25.54W

Motoring away in Costa Rica

Visit Finland is now motoring steady 7.5 knots towards Panama Canal. Boat maintenance and other administrative tasks are being done now that we have few days of spare time.

Our watches have been split to further two, so that we have now 3-4 people on watch instead of full 7-8. This gives everyone more time to rest or do whatever they want with the extra 2-3 hours we gain.

I have spent my spare time editing a dolphin video, which is now ready and shiny on my personal computer (Mac). Unfortunately I’ll need to reconstruct the whole shabang also on a media laptop, which is a PC. I have arrived to this inconvenient situation because in my daily design profession I choose to work with extremely powerful Macs that have enough processing power to crunch hard when required, video being one of those jobs requiring extra oomph. Now, I’m missing a plug-in that allows export to the video format I need, and it is impossible to download anything in the Pacific as you might imagine! So there I go, doing the mechanical work again in steaming hot saloon with clunky software, charging the laptops every two hours. If I lose my will to live within next 24 hours, you know what caused it.

Electric storms

Strangely enough we have been now motoring two days in cloudy and rainy climate, which is completely different from the sailing time. We would have very much enjoyed this breeze during the last few days of the race, it could have given us that extra mile required for the second position – but what is done is done. We’re motoring, I’m mothering with Thomas and collecting top 10 photos from the race plus editing video, so the time will pass very quickly.

We have been driving in and out of squalls and electric storms. Last night a cloud bank kept lighting up when lightnings swept across one after another. It was beautiful, although we had to man our main sheet just in case the wind picked up and we ended up right on our ear. It’s still hot down below, but now there’s cooler breeze blowing down below during the night time.

We can see the coast of Costa Rica, where I’d love to visit one day. I have arrived into a conclusion that dark and rainy England is not the place to spend a winter after this sunny journey, so I’ll need to see what kind of working opportunities there are in sunnier climates. There are beach bums and skiing bums, but are there such creatures as yacht bums? Here’s a capable RYA offshore yachtmaster mate / crew / deck hand available from September 2012 onwards – spread the word, chaps!

Scheming and plotting in Costa Rican coast, 09.11.53N 085.21.71W

Third!

Visit Finland has finished Race 10 from San Francisco Bay to Panama, taking third position across the finish line.

We crossed the finish line on 1st May at 19:41 UTC, but started receiving congratulating emails already hours before our actual finish. We were bobbing in very light winds until the very end, practically fearing for getting stuck in a wind hole the last few miles to the finish line. The race viewer however thought differently: folks at home celebrated our finish before we did. Fortunately this time it ended well.

It isn’t a surprise that the Gold Coast took the first podium place again, but this time Welcome To Yorkshire did a fantastic offshore flyer and got us with a big gamble that paid off – they finished second and were hot on Goldie’s heels. Congratulations to Goldie and WTY! We were very relieved to hear that DLL was well behind us in the last schedules, as we were pretty much parked for several hours during the night time.

We have been wanting a podium finish since Gold Coast, five months ago, and now finally we are back on the track. Currently we are third in the overall results, but some hard work will see us level with DLL hopefully soon.

The boat is now tidy and deck is clean after a quick tidy-up above and below decks. We took our lightweight spinnaker down shortly after the finish, and started the engine in order to make it in time to Panama Canal and the crossing to Atlantic side. It has been a fabulous, sunny and hot day.

Today has also been a great day for dolphin watching, as we saw two different kinds of dolphins playing at the bow in the morning. I did further experiments with my dolphin cam, but this time it did not go underwater as the camera could not be properly strapped onto a boat hook in a hurry. Next time!

The firehose is now again suspended to the boom and it’s showertime. There was some fun looking swimming pool going on in the snakepit a while ago. I shall hop in.

Chilling out at 12.17.80N 090.32.23W

Dolphins galore

Yesterday morning a pod of eight dolphins swam with Visit Finland for spectacular six hours. It was a real treat that is easy to remember for years to come.

Several consecutive days we have seen pods of dolphins feeding at dawn, speeding across our bow chasing shoals of fish. Yesterday morning they did something completely different: a pod of Bottlenose dolphins spent good six hours playing and riding our bow waves. They were absolutely adorable. I knew that dolphins are playful, but yesterday we witnessed behaviour that I could only describe as joy of being alive. It was like a bunch of cheerful teenagers rocking the town. I could hear their chatter, whistles and clicks when sitting just two meters above them at the bow. They surfed in the waves, twisted and turned, swam upside down in the bubbles and jumped up in air every now and then. How could anyone get tired of watching them?

Video spectacle in making

I believe that photographs can never make justice to the real experience of seeing dolphins. They are fast swimmers, and a good part of their charm is in the graceful speeding, twisting and turning in the water. A still camera can never capture their play satisfyingly, hence I filmed them for a while. Five minutes into filming one of the dolphins jumped in the air, flipped his tail and sent a massive splash of water straight up to my camera! (Nevermind, the camera is still fine.)

Encouraged by the proximity and playfulness of these dolphins, we embarked to an experimental filming quest at the bow with skipper Oli. We attached a GoPro video camera to a boat hook and plunged it underwater to capture the dolphins from different perspective. The results were beyond our expectations – absolutely spectacular footage, even the dolphin chatter was captured in the soundtrack. I am now editing this video footage in our boiling hot saloon down below, so the process might take a while from all the cooling down breaks. Hopefully this video clip will be ready to be distributed by Clipper in their YouTube channel in couple of weeks time.

So it seems the we have already found our video production roles: Skipper Oli – underwater camera unit, Riikka – first camera unit, direction, editing, everything else. This is the way forward!

Snow white, go home

Yesterday also a little warbler kept us company above decks, two Risso’s dolphins joined the pod of Bottlenose dolphins, turtles kept swimming past us and Daz saw a Manta Ray jump from the water. What is this crazy place? Can Manta Rays jump? Are they making this all up?

Delighted and excited at 12.48.59N 091.04.70W

Slow shuffle

Visit Finland is in stealth mode and sneakily drifting towards Panama and race 10 finish line in light winds.

To gybe or not to gybe? Navigator Nick keeps an eye on our sailing angles and course in wind shifts, and more often than not the skipper Oli is woken up in the middle of the night to assess the situation and make the call for action (or inaction).

When the skipper calls a gybe, the crew starts running preparations in their minds. There are four phases to each evolution: preparation, execution, trim and tidy-up. It is important to make careful preparations, so that everything will be running smoothly from the moment the main sail is de-powered. In a cruiser one can take all the time in the world to get things done, but in a race we’ll need to keep the boat speed as high as possible at all times.

A spinnaker gybe might sound complicated, but it really isn’t. Just set up the new pole, center the main sail, gybe the boat, ease out the main, put the leeward side pole to bed. Bish bash bosh, done! Naturally each of these major steps need to be broken to smaller tasks, like attaching up-haul, down-haul and lazy guy to the new pole, shuffling preventor lines and what not, but it’s all very logical if you’ll just think what we are trying to achieve and what lines are needed where and in which order. I like symmetrical spinnakers because they are so easy.

This morning, just before a watch change we gybed our lightweight spinnaker in very light winds – practically in no wind at all. I found myself at the bow manhandling a massive amount of canvas around the forestay, as there was no wind to fill up the sail and pull it around automatically. They say “never put yourself to the wrong side of the spinnaker”, meaning that the canvas can easily swipe you overboard if it inflates suddenly and you’re between the spinnaker and the guardrail. Today I carried armfuls of limp canvas, that didn’t seem to be that powerful man-mangler that it usually is.

Roots of phosphorescence?

This morning we saw loads of some blue phosphorescent spheres in the water, which were large enough to be eggs of some kind. These spheres were beautiful electric blue, drifting past us in groups. I wonder if these were jellyfish eggs or something else? In any case they were very intriguing and beautiful in the dark morning water.

I’m off to my bunk after a graveyard shift watch. Sweet dreams.

Laundry day

Hand wash laundry techniques are being perfected onboard Visit Finland. Temperature is high and therefore clothes get dirtier quicker.

It may be a surprising fact that I used smaller number of clothes during the North Pacific crossing than now during a hot, coastal leg south to Panama. It is unnecessary to change clothing often during cold legs if one doesn’t sweat, for example one layer of thermals can be worn easily for two weeks when combined with socks, mid-layers and a dry suit. Hot climates are an entirely different matter: one sweats just by sitting still in the sunshine and suncream sticks to clothes the moment it’s been applied. During these first two weeks I have already gone through majority of my warm leg wardrobe and therefore my laundry hangs out on the rail drying.

I’ve discovered that 1-2 hours of soaking in the bucketful of soapy water does the trick. The clothes can be rinsed by trailing them in the sea from the back of the boat – it could not be any easier! It goes without saying that a sail tie or a safety line needs to be put through all clothes before throwing them in the water. A very short rinse is enough for hand washing soap, therefore even drag is not a problem with this laundering technique. It is however advised to check the jellyfish situation before doing any washing!

Substitutes

Ssshh! I’ll let you in a secret: Bovril (beef extract) makes great Marmite substitute. We’ve got two small pots of Bovril on board, so I think it will see me through to New York unless the secret goes out. We have only sweet snacks on board, so I’m guarding the Bovril like crown treasures as I much more prefer savoury stuff.

Is this like an alcoholic switching from brandy to anti-freezer? Perhaps not – I can live without Marmite or Bovril, but they just make life so much better when comforts are few and far between.

Sun is already out at 0530! It’s lovely warm here in America Trench at 15.31.38N 098.42.83W