Ben, crew, whole expedition 25th Sept
Well, a nice day, again. We weighed anchor at nine o’clock, bidding farewell to Eagles Quest on the way, and left our beautiful little bay to head south. The planned route would take nine and a half hours so we were in no rush. At twelve we decided to practise the man over board procedure with the bucked tied to a fender. What you do is you notice that someone’s over the side, you then shout MAN OVERBOARD! And make sure everyone’s noticed. You then point at the person in the water, and keep pointing. It’s impossible to find something again in the water once you’ve lost sight of it. Someone or other grabs the helm and gets us off auto. That person then assumes control of the situation. Unless Mike or Andrew are about. If they are they get command as skipper and first mate. They then assign roles to everyone else. Send mayday, turn engine on, get boathook and so on. You then do a circle around the person in the water so you know where they are for sure. You then come round into wind so you have full control of the boat. You drive close past them, the guy with the hook grabs them, engine into neutral, man with hook guides them round to the transom where a couple of people are waiting to pull the water man onboard and get him safe. Engine into drive, auto pilot on, water man inside, voila. Day saved.
When we arrived at the anchorage we had a bit of a game getting the anchor down. There were lots of sheer cliffs in the water reaching down to a point that was too deep for our chain. We eventually found a place and put down fifty meters of chain. Even if the anchor hasn’t caught that’s still half a ton in the water. We then put a secondary, smaller, anchor out the back to help us stay in place. It seems to have worked fine. Dinner was Andrew’s job so we had lamb hotpot with mashed potatoes and chunks of bread. Lovely. Eagles Quest sadly didn’t turn up so we’re anchoring alone tonight. I assume they just left too late, I wouldn’t want to enter this place in the dark. After dinner Dad, Mike and I got the dingy out. The anchorage is right by a tiny village called Fiskenaesset with a couple of small pontoons so we we paddled out in the dark and tied up. The three of us then had a walk around the town for about an hour. It’s really really nice. largish houses, clean, proper roads, school, the works. We ran into a couple of people on our travels who were perfectly friendly and spoke surprisingly good English. In short, I want to stay longer. We’re going to go ashore again in the morning but it’s quite late now and I have to go to bed. Just quickly though. We’ve just received word that we’ve got a lovely hurricane coming up from the south Atlantic. Our expectation is that it’ll have lost energy by the time it gets to here. That’s the most likely outcome, but we’ll be watching our Zygrib files very closely. See you in the morrow, bye.