Official Jessica Watson Blog

On Friday there was another front that came through, bringing with it close to 40 knots of wind again, but that passed pretty quickly. After four days of overcast sky, today we've got lovely sunshine and a comfortable 15 knots of wind.

The good progress means that we're now not far away from two little islands, Amsterdam and Saint Paul. So I've got my fingers crossed that the weather stays good so that I can pass close by and possibly even get a bit of a look at them.

All's well out here with one tragic exception. The lollies supply is running low. Sure there's still plenty spread out through the fortnightly food bags, but my additional stock for when I eat all the good stuff in the first few days (which is fairly often!) is down to just a few lonely packets. So now in the second part of the fortnight when I need a sugar hit, the only thing left to satisfy my craving is a sorry little pile of lollies called 'Goo-hearts', which taste about as good as you'd expect from the name!

A few people have mentioned that I don't talk about the ins and outs of actually sailing Ella's Pink Lady very often. One of the reasons for this is because quite often there isn't actually all that much to talk about. Because of her simple rig and because this isn't a race, more a sort of marathon cruise, it's a very simple boat to handle. To give you an example, I can pull all three reefs in and out of the mainsail (meaning that I can increase or decrease the size of the main sail) without even leaving the companionway, and pretty much everything else can be handled from the cockpit. In fact, because I have an over-cautious habit of pulling up the storm jib on the inner-forestay whenever the weather forecast is bad and the wind rises above about 25 knots, I can actually claim to have left the safety of the cockpit in over 35 knots of wind only once. In an un-exciting and not very dramatic way, that's actually quite amazing.

So sorry to spoil all those dramatic ideas about me heroically battling with sails on the foredeck in monster seas and high winds, but this particular voyage is more about cutting down on risks, lots of preparation and sticking it out for a (very!) long time than edge of your seat action sailing. That comes later!

Also, despite all the speculation and even a few of my own doubts before departure, there hasn't been one time out here (so far!) that I've wished I was stronger. I'd really like to say that's because of my huge muscles and super human strength, but sadly that wouldn't be true. In fact it would be a very, very long way from the truth. The reason I find Ella's Pink Lady so easy to handle is because of the time and thought we put into setting her up and because of the kind of boat Ella’s Pink Lady is.  The S&S 34 isn't a big boat and its design is pretty conservative. The things you have to do (sigh) in the absence of super powers!

Anyway, having some sunshine again has been a good chance to get back to work at my de-moulding efforts. This time I've been attacking the insides of various lockers, which has actually been quite good fun as I've been finding all sorts of bits and pieces that I'd lost or had forgotten about. The best find of all was my iPod which went missing some time ago. It's almost like having 8GB of new music!

Jesse