Ben Edwards, crew from the Coronation Gulf
You remember how earlier on this leg we were consistently doing over eight knots? Well that situation has changed somewhat. The wind came round onto our bow a while ago and we started getting waves against rather than with us. The upshot of all that was that now we’re doing an average of four point three knots over the ground, yay. Luckily this isn’t supposed to last long. In the next nine hours or so it’s supposed to come round to the south, at which point we’ll be able to speed on ahead like good little people trapped in an aluminium tub thousands of miles from home.
About two weeks before this trip started I was at a paragliding festival in the Lake District. During this festival I managed to roll my left ankle in a very painful manner. There was a man from Mountain Rescue with us who had a look at it. By that time it looked like someone had tried to inflate it with a tyre pump. This man told us he thought it was broken so The Mother had to take me to Whitehaven Hospital. Some x-rays were done and it was proclaimed that I’d been lucky enough not to break the joint and had instead merely torn a ligament. For this I was recommended total rest for a couple of days before occasional short walks followed by physio and so on. I wasn’t allowed to run for three weeks and my foot was large enough not to be able to fit in my shoe for a week. Because of unfortunate timing I was on the boat before this process had finished, it also seemed as if the ankle had healed properly, I didn’t get any pain from it waling around and so on. Then, two months later we arrived in Tuk and I discovered just how not healed it was. It was so much weaker than my right ankle that after a couple of hundred meters it would hardly support me. I have now gone back to doing the physio for it. This is of course very irritating but I’ll hopefully have it strongish again by the time I get home. I certainly hope so, a reoccurring torn ligament would put a stop to all the sports that I do. You cannot trampoline with a weak ankle.
That’s it for today. I’ll write again when I get the chance, not long till the passage is over now. Not long now. Bye.