Advanced Biology

Day eight, leg two, and the fast sailing continues.

Even with yesterday’s ‘mellow’ conditions, our odometer has been ticking. We have logged over 3,500 miles since the start of the leg. Doing some crude math, that's an average of better than 400 miles per day at an average of better than 17 knots.

No one expected this leg to go so quickly. We are into our fifth weather pattern and each has nearly-seamlessly linked up with the next. Each has produced winds allowing us to sail in the direction we want to sail. A week before the start of leg two, when teammates asked when we’d arrive in India my response was, Never. Twenty-three days seemed not out of the question, making the leg three start for Singapore a worry in itself. Wrong. We are well ahead of schedule.

Again we have our favorite sail up, the Fractional Zero, and again we are power reaching in easterly tradewinds. We will crank out another 450 mile day. When the sun comes up tomorrow we will be at the threshold of the doldrums. The leaders will lose the tradewinds first, and the fleet will compress.

From here, the final 1200 miles to Cochin will be tricky. The water temperature is nearly 30 degrees C in this part of the ocean. Hot water, hot air, and calms breed squalls and thunderstorms. I’m not expecting to get much sleep as we try to link cloud to cloud. Think six days more and expect some shakeups in the leader board.

Stop press. The sun just came up and we see the Russians. They are just to leeward and ahead, no longer a blip on the computer screen. Time to do some hunting.


But before I go, this scene from Saturday:

Gerd Jan ‘Johnnie’ Poortman, climbs onto the deck and sez,

"Where am I? I went through the wrong door of the time machine. Beam me up Scottie.”

A lot had changed during his four-hour slumber.

Sun. Warmth. Nice smoooooth waves, 15 knots of wind. All these had mysteriously arrived. The boat was silently, gently, brushing aside a bow wave at 14 knots.

Fortunately, for me, I’ve had an action packed day. We’ve been moving the boat through a wind transition zone, like a queen attacking the king on a chess board. That's kept me occupied. Otherwise I might have been nominated to clean up the ‘super fund’ toxic waste site onboard Delta Lloyd. Fortunately, I can tell the story in the third person and not the first.

Our boat, for safety reasons, is divided into four sections, each separated by a water-tight bulkhead. In each bulkhead is a door permitting passage from one compartment to the next. We live in the middle two. There is an aft compartment that contains all the steering mechanisms. There is a forward compartment, just two feet square, barely big enough for a person to climb into. We use it for storing trash. It is now known as the super fund site.

Two days ago, I was sitting in my nav station, holding on for dear life because of the violent motions of the boat, when I noticed two guys making a tremendous commotion up front. When I looked up, they said “Hey Matt, get up here. You have to see this.”

They were laughing.

Bad sign.

When I crawled to the front of the boat they handed me a flashlight and instructed me to look in the forward compartment. So I did. I grabbed the flashlight and poked my arm and my head through the door . . .

It was horrible. I lurched back. The laughter was now hysterical. I managed a chuckle and a comment: “Oh, that’s not good, not good at all.”

What it is:

The three trash bags that we had stored in the bow from our first five days exploded. I’d use a word more dynamic than exploded if I knew of one, because ‘exploded’ honestly does not even come close. Left-over food, empty freeze-dry packages, tea bags, toilet paper, candy wrappers, all were plastered to the walls and ceiling. The rest of the trash was floating in a cauldron, a cist. A swamp of sea water that had penetrated the compartment completed the brew, and it had been shaking around up there for three days. The smell was very, very, very, very bad.

Did I mention that it smelled bad?

We shut the door and called it a problem for a calm day.

Since today Scottie beamed us into this parallel universe of calm seas and gentle sailing, we decided that today was The Day. Soon we will be in 100+ degree heat. This is a project we could not put off until India. ‘Dutch’ Ed and ‘Media Man’ Sander were the brave souls who volunteered for the clean-up. When they went in, I wasn’t sure that they would ever come back. Going anywhere near the opening in the bulkhead made me choke. I ran away before I passed out or . . .

I'm an engineer. I don't have words for supergawdawfulness.

Ninety minutes later Sander and Ed emerged. Like soldiers just returned from the front, they have fallen silent, exchanging glances between them that seem to tell tales only a veteran could understand. I assume that both will suffer post traumatic stress for the remainder of the race.

The door to the forward compartment is shut. I don't know the details and I don't want to know the details but I assume our slurry has been rebagged and that is the best that can be done. I assume that the next seven or so days of sailing through the tropics will cook up quite a biology experiment. I assume I hope I think I can pretend that part of the boat does not exist.

Matt out out out