Lighter winds give Mark Covell ( MCM) time to ruminate.

Spoons at Dawn

The winds are getting lighter, the man smells are getting stronger and the will to eat up the sea miles is certainly not fading away. In my blogs I have tried to bring you the feelings from onboard not just the A,B & Cs of daily life on this V70. Here are some ongoing themes from life above and below deck.

Food is obviously an ongoing topic. The preparation is simple, boil water, tip freeze-dry food into eski, add water, re-hydrate. Then serve up with a large ladle, doing your best impression of every prison film you have ever seen.

I like to get a good splat in the food bowl before I lean over to the bemused crewman and say in hushed voice "It's tonight, we're breaking out, we're getting out... You coming?" It gets the same strange look every time.

The flavours range from bland to blander. The all time favourite is the eagerly anticipated Chicken and Mushroom Thai Curry. The big benefit of this dish is for once the mushrooms actually look like mushrooms. The food itself can't bring everything that a growing Volvo Ocean sailor needs to keep fit and healthy, so let me introduce the second biggest topic outside the subject of winning a yacht race: supplements. They come in all shapes and disguises. The fish oil tablet repeats on you all day until it's time to take another one. The rest of the pills and powered drinks just give you wind. The sound of creaking sheets, easing on the winches above deck can often be drowned out by fluctuant flatulence emitting from the sleeping bears bellow. If only we could harness the power to ease us through the Doldrums.

Needing a breath of fresh air myself from my own cramped space I just put my head up out of the hatch and ask for inspiration about the next biggest topic discussed. Stig (Westergaard) impressively suggested that politics and philosophy got the biggest airtime on his watch... Deep. But without doubt it's the constant question of "Who has nicked my spoon" that got the vote.

In the effort to keep the weight down someone thought we only needed one spoon per person and three spare spoons to get us to Cape Town in good shape. After only three days at sea we were four spoons down. Now if you think this is pretty unimportant thing to worry about on the VOLVO OCEAN RACE - LIFE AT THE EXTREME, you must remember that we only have one bowl and one spoon each. Loose your spoon and life can get pretty extreme.

Tack Back and Stack

Last night was hot and humid. My choice to sleep under my media desk straddling the two small beams that run down the floor was justified. We were approaching the Cape Verdi Islands in light winds and I knew we were going to be gybing all night. That would mean being woken and moved from side to side like a sack of potatoes about once every hour. Please don't feel too sorry for me, as the lads sailing the boat would get a lot less sleep than I would. The real reason I needed to keep a low profile was because I wanted to keep out of the military manoeuvres involved in stacking. Let me introduce you to the art, and it is an art of STACKING

stack |stak| noun

1) a pile of objects, typically one that is neatly arranged : a stack of boxes. ( a stack of/stacks of) informal a large quantity of something : there's stacks of work for me now!

2) arrange (a number of things) in a pile, typically a neat one DERIVATIVES ORIGIN Middle English : from Old Norse stakkr 'haystack,' of Germanic origin.

In modern nautical terms and in the case of the VO70 rule it is the act of moving everything that isn't bolted down to the preferred side of the boat. That can mean forward in light airs or as far aft and to windward in heavy airs. The bottom line is, whenever the boat tacks or gybes, the stacking team gets busy. They split into two groups, one stacks the sails on deck and the other moves all the kit and equipment below. I half expect them to break into a sombre rhythmical song like a prison chain gang.

The call goes out "let's gybe" and like a pack of silent ants shifting a twig ten times their size, the crew descends to commence the stack. The whole show lasts about 10 minutes and depending on how wet the sails are the team can move up to 2.5 tones each time, 300kg of that is food bags. Each food day-bag we eat is one less they have to stack. I of course due to the rule am not allowed to help in the fun and as I have already made myself reasonably unpopular in closely filming this chore, prancing about, getting in the way, carrying no more than a small Sony video camera, I now try to keep low profile.

Now you understand my decision to hide in my hole in the back last night. So when you hear in a race report that a boat put 20 short tacks up the coast for example. It wasn't just the case of turning the wheel, swinging the keel and sheeting on. It involves a lot more huffing and puffing, panting and persuading than you ever thought before. So you now know why Volvo navigators and tacticians, think twice before they call for a full "tack back, and stack!"

Mark Covell - MCM.

Visit www.volvooceanrace.org for all the latest news!

The Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09 will be the 10th running of this ocean marathon. Starting from Alicante in Spain, on 4 October 2008 with in-port racing, it will, for the first time, take in Cochin, India, Singapore and Qingdao, China before finishing in St Petersburg, Russia for the first time in the history of the race.

Spanning some 37,000 nautical miles, stopping at 11 ports and taking nine months to complete, the Volvo Ocean Race is the world's premier yacht race for professional racing crews.