I sent my wife a note the other day before we left. She told me the message really helped her to get her head around the leg we have ahead of us. It went something like this: 48 to 72 hours to get away from the Qingdao/China coastal region, two weeks give or take to New Zealand, 10 days in the Southern Ocean to Cape Horn where we turn left and then eight days up the South American coast to Rio.
There are a number of ways to break down a trip like this and I think everyone has their own way of going about it. A real simple one would be to count down the food bags. We put two days worth of food into one bag and we have 20 food bags onboard, anticipating a possible 40 day leg. Bag one came out two nights ago around midnight. We had porridge for breakfast and followed by Pasta Primavera and Spaghetti Bolognese. It will be nice to empty the first bag and start the next one knowing that it's one less bag cluttering the boat up and six meals nearer to some nice Brazilian Steak. Does a two day food bag put us a tenth of the way there in distance...maybe, but probably not.
If the 48 hour food bag cycle is too long, there is the option of going sched to sched. This is the four hourly position reports that we receive from Volvo telling us how we did relative to the fleet in the four hours since the previous sched. I'm not a big fan of this one but I know that the racers love it. Capey has some special calculation running inside the Excel spreadsheet that displays the position report that breaks the distance to the finish (DTF) into the number of Hobarts to go. For those of you who are not familiar with the Hobart, I am referring to the Sydney to Hobart Race that takes place every year starting on Boxing Day from Sydney, Australia and sailing the 620 miles to Hobart in Tasmania. It is a notorious race and one that is well known to all the crews in the Volvo fleet. Right now we have about 19.2 Hobarts to go.
Another system that I quite enjoy in a sick sort of way is what I call the prison countdown. On the wall in the media station I have the days and weeks marked off with marker pen. Every sixth day I put a line through and start the next row. I can tell you that since we left Newport, Rhode Island on what we called Leg Zero we have spent 70 full days on this boat, and since Alicante it has been 61 days. This leg to Rio will subtract from my approximately 140 day sentence significantly.
-Rick
