Tuesday and Wedneday – Life on board

Day 3 – Tuesday
The star studded heavens were treated to a three part chorale harmony of Jo, Patrick and Niamh ranging from Pavarotti’s Turnandot to The Fields of Athenry.

Life ashore: there’s no day, no night, just an endless series of three hour watches with two joint happy hour watches morning and evening.  You sleep when and if you can below, you live to eat, work, laugh or feel sick on deck.
As we ran down our westing that  marvel of mariners,  Fastnet, a nautical icon, was bathed in a beautiful  red sunrise.  Past Mizen we beat onto a calf, cow and bull, remarkably  perforated by an arch.  Our breath was taken by awe inspiring Skellig Micheal with it’s world heritage site monastery perched high seaward on it’s shoulder.  Who were the monks?  How did they live? What did they eat? (was it Tunnocks or Hobnobs?)  How passionately they must have loved their faith, to volunteer so much endurance to spread it.  We are all in their debt.

Life on board continues with one member celebrating with high fives, the achievement o f a bowel motion after  three days.  Breakfast is life saving hot porridge to counter the cold, tired early morning.  Lunch is a sandwich, while we enjoy or endure heated ration packs for dinner.  Our first delight was Lancashire hotpot……

Day 4 – Wednesday
‘Rat Pack’ not who we are but what we eat!  Our dinners are pre-cooked Lancashire hotpots, Chinese ‘Hu Flung Dung’ or ‘ Wn Hung Lo’with boiling water added.

Patrick our mainmast maestro has three times climbed the mast in the last 24 hours, usually to fetch or mend damaged halyards.  Patrick is winched 45 feet over the deck to the top of the rig, swinging through a sixty degree arc while simultaneously trying to hold on and stitch in a new halyard.
We have become sleep scavengers aching and yearning for shut eye.  While we have no major breakages but numerous occasions where five or six crew have been needed to hoist or drop a 108 square metre spinnaker in a big breeze.  Martina had her glasses  broken in one nasty swipe, but we thrash on, now abeam of Rathlin O’Beirne island in South West Donegal having surfed up much of the west coast.

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