Birthday on the boat

It was my 19th birthday yesterday. Strange to think that a year ago I was still at school working on my personal statement for university, A levels still to come and I had only just started to think about doing the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. A lot has changed in the past year! My Birthday started off as normal with our watch on from 6am till midday. In the 'happy hour'  which is our daily lunch time meeting I was given a gift of a pot of Nutella due my addiction to it, (many times I have been caught with a spoon and pot of Nutella in my hand!) and a duck with goggles drawn on him (my nickname on board is 'Biggles' as I have a pair of sailing goggles and hat that make me look like the character Biggles!). The whole crew then sang Happy Birthday to me and they had baked a chocolate and caramel cake, with custard of course! This will be a Birthday I will always remember!

Race start for this leg was very interesting for us; Matt decided to play it safe and not get too in the way of race start in case of collisions! Coincidently two boats did collide causing enough damage to delay them for 24 hours, now they are back racing and hot on our heels. Our first 24 hours back at sea were rough, with up wind sailing, meaning our new and rejoining crew members; Helen, Anthony, Stephen, Fi, Mark and Katherine had to quickly adapt to life at an angle! Over the last few hours the wind has eased off and we are sailing more on a beam reach (the wind at 90 degrees to us) meaning the boat is flatter and life below deck is a lot easier! On this afternoon's watch we saw some dolphins, which was exciting for the new crew members as well as us old ones as the last time we saw dolphins was during leg 2, it makes uneventful watches more interesting and more photos for our huge album!

At the moment we are in 8th place but we are the boat furthest south which is good news in terms of Matt's plans, at some point we will be starting to turn further east and make our way south of Tasmania and then north up to Sydney, this is going to be a short race of around 10 days so I think we are going to have some exciting sailing as we get closer to the coast and I hope less damage to our sails!