News from the fleet
News from the fleet on the 1st day of 2026! Lovely to hear the responses about their New Year surprise buckets!
SV FRYD: Dawn on New Year’s Eve. I can probably put these 2 pics up every day for the next 17 days or so as that’s the limit of what we see day in and day out!
And perhaps also the limits of our perspective on the world today. Aren’t we the lucky ones! I’m often asked what is the attraction ‘out there’. Other than the sailing, which is unstimulating, monotonous, battering, wet, nauseating, sweaty, fishy (not much) and sometimes exhilarating, it’s the vast expanse and remote wilderness that draws. I find the open ocean as beautiful and humbling as the Kalahari. Easy to write off as featureless, but, in fact, not! Constantly changing ocean-scape, birds, flying fish, dolphins, whales, seals, wind, no wind, waves, no waves, fresh fish meals, no fresh fish meals. Also, one constant – this Viking Jarl! Grateful for this friendship, which started when Sue and I sailed with him to South Georgia in 2014. Since, I, and often Sue also, have sailed Scotland, Hebrides, trans North Atlantic to Caribbean, Cuba, USA and Canadian East coast, Greenland, Cabo Verde, Cape Town to St Helena and now this. Some miles, lots of laughs. Enough rambling for now, there’s a not flushing toilet to fix today…
Dawn on New Year’s Eve. I can probably put these 2 pics up every day for the next 17 days or so as that’s the limit of what we see day in and day out!
And perhaps also the limits of our perspective on the world today. Aren’t we the lucky ones! I’m often asked what is the attraction ‘out there’. Other than the sailing which is unstimulating, monotonous, battering, wet, nauseating, sweaty, fishy (not much) and sometimes exhilarating, it’s the vast expanse and remote wilderness that draws. I find the open ocean as beautiful and humbling as the Kalahari. Easy to write off as featureless, but, in fact, not! Constantly changing ocean-scape, birds, flying fish, dolphins, whales, seals, wind, no wind, waves, no waves, fresh fish meals, no fresh fish meals. Also, one constant – this Viking Jarl! Grateful for this friendship, which started when Sue and I sailed with him to South Georgia in 2014. Since, I, and often Sue also, have sailed Scotland, Hebrides, trans North Atlantic to Caribbean, Cuba, USA and Canadian East coast, Greenland, Cabo Verde, Cape Town to St Helena and now this. Some miles, lots of laughs. Enough rambling for now, there’s a not flushing toilet to fix today…
SV African Skimmer: Bit of a slow day for us with mostly light winds. Only made about 125 NM in the last 24 h. We opened a couple of bottles of champagne and our bucket of goodies kindly provided by the race committee. Very disappointed not to find any champagne in there but luckily, we had a few of our own. Have been enjoying the fun games and other goodies in the bucket though! After we finished our new year celebrations we put in a gybe and were heading north for a good part of the night to try and avoid a big whole in the wind to the west of us. We are now in much better wind (15 vs 8 knots previously) so hopefully this will pay off in the long run. Looking forward to another great day of sailing. Desperately trying to catch some fish without success so far… we clearly need to try something different given our competitors success in this area…
SV Metric4T: Thank you for the surprise bucket to help bring in 2026!
Gents had their 1st shave today :), light winds, balmy weather, fishing lines out.
