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From : Sarah Brice Yacht : Concert Date : 14 October, 1996 You've been following the race positions, read the chat show reports and been bamboozled by the race analysis, so here's something a little different. This is a slot for me to share with you the ramblings of a crew volunteer's brain. Please bear in mind as you read that I'm floating around in the middle of an ocean in a metal box with 13 other people, so they're probably a little different from yours. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. I should set the scene first: DAY 14 : Bowling through the Tropics toward the Equator, jostling with the other lead boats to get through the lottery of the Doldrums. Spinnaker run all the way, so a flat yacht and gentle motion - not too much crashing around (remember the start?). It's HOT. Dress code is shorts and T-shirts at night and less during the day if other crew members can handle it. Two weeks into the race and our grip on normality is slipping. More likely, our ''normality'' is changing. We live in our own isolated world, where our only responsibility is to look after ourselves and each other, to get ahead of the yachts around us, and to have a laugh in the process. We watch our positions avidly on race reports and chat shows, and this sets the mood onboard. In our enclosed world day and night roll into one and each day has little to distinguish it from the next. Our normality is created by routine, the details of which are becoming ever more finely tuned. Worryingly so !. Even the most mundain decision has become worthy of full crew discussion - whether to have peach or pear delight for pudding (one is pink, the other green, identical taste), or how to keep our melting Mars bars alive for a few more days. We're well past chocolate latitudes now, so scoobie snacks will be non-melting from now on. I wonder how this will affect crew morale. We truly are away from it all and tick on blissfully unaware of events in the world at large. I caught the headlines on the trusty World Service yesterday and they didn't mean a great deal to me. Mind you, news that a catholic bishop in East Timor has won the Nobel Peace Prize may not have you at home in Middle Wallop jumping up and down in front of your TV sets. Our touch with daily life in England faded as the last tones of ''The Archers'' crackled out of earshot around Cape Finesterre. We now live out our own daily soap opera onboard.
Signing off, Sarah
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