| At sea. Volvo Ocean Race: ABN AMRO ONE skipper remembers Grant Dalton's cleaning fetish |
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| Friday, 14 April 2006 | |
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Mike Sanderson: Okay, I think I have gone to new levels here..... many of my friends and family said that I should be sponsored by a cleaning products company due to how much " Spray and Wipe" I use on my Power Boat and in my House, lets just say that I like clean boats, anyway, today I have gone to the highest level in spray and wipe commitment. I used it on myself! The story was that the one small thing of shower Gel that we keep for in the rain has either been all used up, or someone has lost it over the side and not confessed to it. Anyway I was getting a little sick of the hot, sticky, smelly feeling and so decided to have my second bucket bath on the back of the boat for the leg. To cut a long story short just the water wasn't cutting it, so out came the spray and wipe, a few squirts all over and now I am clean and disinfected! What's more smelling of Lemons! So Mr Spray and Wipe if you happen to be a yachting fan, how about a little discount on my next pallet of it? I remember at Grant Dalton's 40th Birthday, the cake was in the shape of a bottle of Jif or Cif for the Europeans as he had a cleaning fetish and Jif was his speed. Luckily for me that is a few years away, so hopefully the boys will have forgotten this. The sailing has been pretty frustrating over the last 48 hours, for a while there we where constantly losing to all the guys behind, as was anybody else that had boats behind them. Overall there was just a total compression happening as the lead boats just sailed into more light and lifted breeze. Over the last day we have won some and we have lost some, so not quite as painful, every time a report comes through and you have held even or gained a little you are just thankful for hanging on for another 6 hours. Right now we are in the middle of this massive stationary front, and so very changeable conditions are to be expected, that makes sched time all that more stressful as you really have no idea what so ever how you have been going, a pretty classic example of that was just in this last report where movistar and us are only 30 miles apart and we had wind directions that where 60 degrees different! There will be some big games of snakes and ladders going on while we are in this stuff. Right now we have timed our Gybe so that it was just an hour before a position report so that the guys behind couldn't really tell which gybe we are on, now we have to wait another six hours until we know whether they have followed us or continued on the same way as before, we think our play to the west will be a short term loss, but that we should get paid back for it by tomorrow afternoon, hopefully with some interest, time will tell. Wildlife wise it has gone really quiet again, not even our brightly colored Jellyfish to accompany us, we still of course have our good friends the Flying fish, but probably even they have only got a couple more days until the water gets too chilly for them as we charge North, now I am not a big fish fan, but this being my third round the world trip, on the first one I realised pretty quickly that I had to be able to pick up a flying fish and throw it back. So you can imagine that the boys had a good chuckle when Crusty (Mark Christensen) who is on his 4th lap of the planet wouldn't pick up a flying fish and free it back to the Ocean. No problem for Jan (Dekker) who just grabbed it. I think everyone was in fact quite relieved that he didn't eat it! Anyway to Crusty's two lovely daughters Maddie and Bonnie, don't expect a whole lot of fishing out of Dad this Christmas when on Summer Holiday. Hopefully Mum will be around. Talk soon, Cheers |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 14 April 2006 ) |
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