Half Term

Hi all,

 

First sorry that I have been lazy and didn’t add any new posts for a while. I promise to be better in the future, however for now I will probably have to limit updates to in-port times.

We are now Qingdao, northern China, for a short stop-over before we going on our long leg (#6) across the Pacific to Seattle. So as always time is limited and we have a lot of work to do on the boat. Therefore, I hope you allow me to be a bit cheeky and use a blog I wrote for the Clipper website to summarize some of my thoughts of my journey so far (I promise to upload more soon):

 

Hello world and keen HotelPlanner.com followers!

You were probably looking forward to a great blog and now this…

Your probably haven’t even seen my name yet and I have successfully dodged blog writing most often so far leaving it to people with more wit and creativity. However, this time I could not convince my Bistro partner to be original beyond a great dinner and now I have to come up with something you might be interested to read and what have not been covered in other blogs yet. Sarah, our media person on the boat used some soft force! I normally follow the advice of a famous writer – “Why write a book, if you can buy one for $5?”

While I still think about possible topics for an epic blog, I can use the space to say “Hello” to my family back in Germany – Hi Mum and Dad, Matthi, Ingi, Daniel, Susann and my 3 beautiful and lovely nieces Linda, Inga, and Luisa and Lenny and the one remaining guinea pig! 🙂 Also a quick “Hey” to my former and future colleagues in London, Boston, San Francisco, Singapore and Sydney and last not least to my friends how follow me and came or will come to visit me!

I think this is a nice ending for my blog…

Hmm…ok yeah Sarah, I didn’t really write anything, but c’mon… no? Ok ok… I write more! :-/

Can I write about that I manage to read on board in my ‘spare’ time (others use that normally for sleeping). I’m now already on the 4th book of the Dark Tower by Steven King and can really recommend it, but don’t watch the movie! Not interesting! Ok…

The importance and annoyance of music on the boat. It can deliver a great soundtrack to our experiences, but as the experiences differ so does the music taste and to be honest, the sound of the ocean is often all the soundtrack that is needed. For my for example the sound of dolphins breaking the surface and breathing while our bow is diving into the water next to them is quite good.

…too general!!

NOW I GOT IT! I can describe the screen of our chartplotter when we were in the middle of a Chinese fishing fleet and saw more than 100 lights (=ships) around us in the middle of the night. Something none of us will forget quickly. … ah.. yeah.. ok – already been covered. Got it!

Maybe about ‘live at an angle’ … boring? Covered already roughly 243 times of previous races are counted in…

Lunch? No?!

Ok, I have to get personal then!!

Maybe for that you wanna flip back to my first blog post. That was in week 2 or 3 of Leg1 to help you. My family was a bit concerned after they read this and I got comments that I was a bit too negative in my writing (however others liked my honesty). To summarise it, I didn’t have a great time and had thoughts about giving up – many times during these first weeks. I was Watch Leader at the time and that didn’t make it easier, as it’s hard to lead when you’re very busy with yourself and with vomiting. Yet, luckily I don’t give up that quickly and decided, just to take the next, the short leg to Cape Town and then if I feel like it another one. I had paid for the whole thing – which seemed crazy and stupid during this first leg – but now I changed my thinking from one leg to the next.

My crew mates had to carry my weight (just figuratively – but it was rapidly reducing anyhow) on occasions – Mary sorry again for those first bistro watches! But how did my experience change!! My body adjusted more each leg and I’m now much fitter than at the start in Liverpool (at which time I was not a couch potato either). Leg 3 was so uplifting with catch-up we achieved and the Australia Leg was probably my favourite so far with the absolute highlight of winning Sydney-Hobart in our class.

And now I have sailed through the South China Sea, we are 2 days away from Qingdao and I am really looking forward to the second longest leg of the entire journey – crossing the mighty Pacific!

I feels great to be at this point and feels even better to be able to look forward to the remaining legs.

And the ones I really want to thank for making is this far – and !WARNING! you might think this is a bit cheesy now – is the entire crew! We are a great mix of characters without any (annoying) egos and we have an atmosphere on board which makes at a home – a family home! Full of trust. I really enjoy sailing with this crazy bunch of people.

Thanks for reading and sorry that I’m still unable to write just a normal blog!

Sailing is great as well. We had the Spinnakers up in the last days and made a super quick change from Code 1 to Code 2 (in under 6 minutes) and videoed it even! We are really good now (although this is not yet! reflected in our overall position). I hope that satisfies the sailing interested readers… Sarah?? Yeah?? Super!!

Bye bye everyone und Tschüss nach Hause!

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