well, it has been a trialling couple of days on Uniquely Singapore. The winds have been light and shifty, often not where the weather forecasts have predicted they will be, which made navigating for our Skipper difficult indeed. Our boat speed has been languishing in the low 6-7 kts whilst the crew rotated all of the sails in frustration: yankee 1 to windseeker, to light wind kite and back again but nothing seemed to be working.
Yesterday Jim (skip) called an ‘emergency meeting’ during our crew happy hour. His motivational speeches have become known as ‘Jim’s Sunday Sermons’ and this time he pulled it out of the bag by reassuring us that with over 3,000 miles still to go this race is far from over. We may be at the back of the fleet at the moment but if we want to be at the front, if we want that podium position badly enough, there is still time to get it. We are currently tracking down towards the Cap Verde islands and the wind should start to build soon. With renewed enthusiasm after Jim’s chat the crew have regained their focus. In the navigation station we have our target speeds up on the computer, together with a funtion that calculates the percentage of our speed compared to our target.
There are now regular calls of ” we are only at 88%, pull it together!”
or shrieks of joy when we surf down a wave and “110%! 115%! Go, go, go!”
Pinned above the computer in the nav station someone has written on a post-it note: “It is always darkest just BEFORE dawn”. Uniquely Singapore has been struggling in the dark hours for the past couple of days but the mood on board is that dawn in just about to break for us and the merlion is ready to climb back up the fleet to the podium position she is hungry for.
