Coconut Watch

We have now spent over a month at sea, so no surprise we are excited to be getting into Singapore sometime tomorrow. For the past week we have been motor sailing due to the light winds and we have taken advantage of the free time to do numerous maintenance jobs and cleaning around the boat. As you can imagine after nearly 5 weeks of hot and stuffy conditions, things below deck start becoming rather unpleasant! It has also allowed me to get some sail repair jobs done, repairing the mainsail (involving a trip up the mast) and checking our Yankees as on the next section of the race they are going to receive a right battering!

The important watches still continue however; Pirate watch- little activity recently although quite a few small fishing boats have approached us trying to sell fish but nothing suspicious. Coconut watch- this is proving unsuccessful as no one can quite reach them with the net as they bob by, lost out at sea. Log watch- we have had a few small collisions with debris but no damage, and traffic watch- well, there are lots of cargo ships around so at night time it's a guessing game as to which way they will go next.

Because of all the motoring we have been doing it was necessary to make a pit stop for fuel, so we called into Malaysia (only for a few hours) and topped up. It also gave us the opportunity to catch up with some of the fleet and we even got to raft up along side Team Garmin for a few hours and exchange stories of the past weeks, and also re-stock up on oil, hot chocolate and spread (items we had run out of) however, I feel they fell short in the bargain as they only received 8 sachets of Tang (a orange drink powder) and half a fruit pudding with custard! But no one complained!

So now this section of the race is over, it's time to prepare for the next. Even though we finished last, we are all pleased we only finished 2 hours behind the 11th place after setting 20 hours late, it was important early on in this race to change our goals and have something we could aim for and it has been good to see how a small group of very different people have changed over the past 5 weeks. It has been a mixture of highs and lows and I know that people have found it really tough, but I feel that the real test will be the next race from the heat of Singapore to the freezing conditions of Qingdao, we will all have to learn how to adapt and cope.