On a daily basis I am trying to process this adventure that I have gotten myself into in a way that I can even begin to write about it so I just have to start typing and see where it takes me.
It’s Thursday November 14 at 7:00 am and I am in my hotel room in Cape Town South Africa by myself. I have just finished listening to a few sailing related podcasts in the wee morning hours – note to self: must check out havannarace for sailboat racing Florida to Cuba – I would be interested!
I have some time before I need to be at the boat to do my shift on “open boat” where we allow visitors onto the boat to get a glimpse of our ship and talk about life onboard. I have no internet access currently because AT&T sucks and there is no WIFI here in my room. My iPad keyboard case is not working properly so I have to use the touch screen typing – argh! I look at the few photos in my IPad gallery, those that will render because I don’t need iCloud connection to see them and it is not many but something might give some inspiration to write.
So let me give some context for the photocoming up – The races are long. They drag on day after day with a fairly set routine built around the watch schedule. Our boat consists of ~18 crew plus professionals: Skipper and AQP. The crew is divided into thirds to create 3 watches. On race 2 my watch consisted of 6 persons and my times were 4:00 am to 8:00 am and 4pm to 8:00 pm – on deck sailing the boat. 8:00 am to 12 noon below decks support watch which involved cooking and cleaning below and being available at a moments notice to go on deck if some sail change or other evolution required more hands. My two off times when I could sleep were 12 noon to 4:00 pm and 8:00 Pm to 4 am. This repeated every day. (Portugal to Uruguay race)
I captured this during one of my down below times. I was minding my own business reading a Kindle book when I saw this photo in the making – Ashfin being crazy per usual and Rick just trying to beat the heat.
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Are we not crazy just a bunch of random people thrown together living the adventure?
In other news I had free time yesterday afternoon so I caught the hop-on-hop-off bus Cape Town tour and made my way to Table Mountain. This and the surrounding mountains form the geologic boundaries of Cape Town. It is not unlike how the Santa Monica mountains bound northern Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades except that these are taller and rise very steeply so there is a very distinct border between city and mountain. Buss dropped us off at the tramway to the top but that was closed due to excessive winds. It was blowing pretty hard and I thought of the new leg and 3 joining crew members who were out on the ocean today doing their mandatory “refresher” sail training. So the only way to the top of Table Mountain this day was to hike it – About 2.5 hours to the top. I thought no big deal. Well not o not! The trail was mostly a rocky sort of staircase mostly 30 degrees up or more. I made about a third up before I had had enough and stopped to rest and snap this city view.
I don’t easily give up but that was enough hiking for me this afternoon.
Back on the bus ride back to town we stopped by the Camps Bay Beach area on the north eastern edge of Cape Town and I got this photo.
Just a year ago I couldn’t have imagined myself in South Africa!
Carl’s Clipper Round The World Race 