Captain's Log
V14/17 Newcastle to Sydney
17 October 2017

A Good Day of Sailing

Hi Everyone,                                 Welcome to Day 3 of our voyage. Overnight and during the early hours of this morning we continued to make good speed to the south taking full advantage of the favourable NE winds and utilising a number of different sail plans which kept the Youth Crew busy throughout the night setting and furling sails. The good news for this voyage is that there has been minimal bouts of the dreaded sailors curse of ‘seasickness’ due to the great conditions that we have experienced during the first three days of the voyage.Given these great conditions we have fitted a lot into our day, starting with an informative morning brief where our resident nautical expert ‘Salty’ enlightened us all on the origin of ‘Port and Starboard’. There were some other guess speakers including James our Navigator who gave us our distances travelled overnight and a weather forecast for today. Once completed it was straight into a good set of cleaning stations (a clean ship is a happy ship) then James mustered everyone at midships and grave a very informative brief on navigation.Lunch and a short ‘siesta’ followed then it was straight into our first set of rope races. This activity is run by Brett the Engineer and is a competition between the three watches designed so that the Youth Crew quickly learn the location of safety equipment and the many sheets, tacks, brails, buntlines and many other lines onboard Young Endeavour. From my observations this is an extremely competitive Youth Crew and already they have been quick to learn where everything is.         Once completed, we closed the ship up at tacking stations and conducted a good set of rotational tacks. This activity gives the Youth Crew the opportunity to move to another watches tacking station so that they develop a good understanding of how everything works when we tack or wear the ship.With this activity complete we handed in fore and aft sails, braced our yards square and settled into some pleasant downwind sailing under all three of our square sails.The time is now 2000 and we are currently located 17nm to the northeast of Jervis Bay still sailing downwind under three squares and achieving 6kts of boat speed. Our current plan is to keep heading south overnight to Bateman’s Bay where plan to anchor tomorrow morning.       Until tomorrow, take care Yours AyeCaptain Gav          

Latitude/Longitude:

34 56. 2 S / 151 06.8 E

Conditions:

Currently located 17nm to the northeast of Jervis Bay sailing downwind in moderate-strong 12-17kt NE winds with a 1m ENE swell. Our current speed is 6kts and the temperature is 17 degrees.