Decent first day overall.

We arrived in what seemed like a hurricane before being brought below deck and introduced to each other.

With the wind and rain still at ridiculous levels, no one was particularly enthusiastic when we were told our next job was to prepare the boat to sail.

Apart from a brief glimpse of sun which did nothing but to generate false hope that the weather might change, the rest of the day was a freezing and wet as the start.

Arriving in the Isle of Wight we were treated to an unusually spectacular sunset and an even more spectacular dinner cooked by the best group.

We woke up today with a lovely view of the sun over the Isle of Wight and prepared and ate bagels with various spreads as a first breakfast on board. Very tasty, even with radioactive lemon-lime chutney.

We set off soon after, sailing straight into the wind with many a tack throughout the day, leading to an unstable and heavily angular day at sea.

There was, at least, the brief respite of jacket potatoes at lunch – medium rare as the chef prefers – stuffed to the brim with beans and cheese. Very sunny all day, aside from when it wasn’t, but a fun time and good first experience with the main sail.

Hopefully the weather at least stays stable, if not improving. Finished the day off with a grand chicken fajita banquet.

Today we headed back east from Yarmouth, and with relatively light winds spent a good chunk of the morning learning to gybe, competing in teams to get the fastest time (which got mildly competitive…) and built some great team morale.

Then we anchored for lunch, seeking to avoid the hectic fairground of the kitchen at sea, and delivered an absolute banquet of halloumi wraps before returning to the deck for yet more biscuits (YAY BISUITS!)

After this the braver members of the crew enjoyed being hoisted up to the top of the 100ft mast whilst their responsible teammates below took great care in not larking around in the slightest throughout. 😉

Then we headed back into Portsmouth for the night, putting the ship to bed on the way in to prepare for a stormy night, seeing a very cool hovercraft, an upside-down house and fine dining on a fab sweet potato curry.

Wrapped up the day with the much dreaded but surprisingly informative first round of speeches, arousing more excitement about maths than I knew possible!

As the weather was not safe enough for us to do any sailing, we spent the day in Portsmouth harbour doing various activities to help us improve our skills, we started with lessons on knot tying and how these knots are used around the ship.

After this, we stepped outside the boat to practice man overboard (MOB) scenarios.

After a final lesson on the conditions that need to be considered for sailing we head of to the D-day Museum where our avid weld inspector Oli inspected the vigorously welded maritime welds on a transport vessel.