Meanwhile At Home

With all the blog updates about Jelte's sailing adventure, you might be tempted to believe its all about sailing at the moment in our family. Not entirely true - although, admittedly I check Jamaica's position first thing in the morning and last thing at night!

New Healthy Diet

With Jelte out of the house for six weeks I saw a golden opportunity to start a new healthy diet - while there is no one to tempt me back to the evil ways of pizza night! A couple of weeks before he took off sailing, I signed up for Weight Watchers Online, and lost a pound or two before realising I hated all the low calorie foods and points counting. 

I started researching for a a diet more in line with my beliefs about what food should really be like, you know - real ingredients, no funky additives or pesticides, and ideally organic. I found the Paleo diet which is based around the use of whole foods, cooking everything from scratch and cutting out gluten and grains such as wheat. That means no bread, rice or pasta and more tasty veggies instead for good carbs. 

The diet is often called the cave man diet as it only allows foods that were available to our Paleolithic ancestors and cuts out lab-concocted Frankenfoods and ready made meals.

So far so good - I thought I would really miss bread, but I haven't. I don't think I've ever spent so much time in the kitchen though but I'm secretly enjoying making my own spice blends, herbal salts, and home made stock! And yes I'm loosing a bit of weight too which is great.

Here's a super easy paleo recipe for making your own herb salts - the Rosemary salt is amazing for roast chicken.

Home Made Herb Salts

• Dry some fresh herbs in the oven - for example rosemary, sage or lemon peel. Use the lowest oven setting and dry the herbs for up to 4 hours, they are ready when they are dry and break when you touch them.
• Mix the herbs with some good quality sea salt. You need twice as much herbs as salt
• Put your new salt in a cute jar - and its done!

Las Vegas 

As you might have heard, Alfie's Blog has been nominated for a Blog Design Award and so we're off to Vegas for the awards ceremony next week! Our friend Sarah is coming to stay for a couple of weeks, and we're planning a road trip to Vegas with Alfie.

We've also signed up for a new training course called K9 Nose Work which I'm sure Alfie will tell you all about on his blog.

View from yesterday's race in the bay

More Sailing

I thought it would be fun to learn some more about sailing so I've joined Jelte's local sailing group here in San Francisco. I haven't really done any sailing since my time in sailing school when I was a kid, and a competent crew course in Thailand ten years ago - but I'm slowly picking up some skills and I almost know which ropes to pull when now. But oh my gosh I had forgotten how many bruises you get from moving around in a boat, my legs are black and blue now! :-)

Steaming to first place

Friday 2 May 11:40

Too hot to think

It's 38 degrees in the nav station as I type this, which is causing everyone's brain to fry... It's making it hard to focus, which is exactly what we have to do; and what we have been doing, in order to charge to the front of the pack.

If you check the mileage we have made over the last 12 to 24 hours, you can see that focus paying off. Whilst other boats have ground to a complete standstill in various light wind conditions, we've been milking every last ounce of speed out of the good ship Jamaica. In some cases that saw us gain 50 miles on some boats within 6 hours!

Racing Ahead

But we have to continue this focus and drive if we want to grab that top podium step in Panama... Great Britain are just a few miles ahead of us (we can see them tantalisingly close on the horizon). And no doubt, as they see us coming, they too are doing everything they can to keep going.

But rest assured we are not going to stop trimming and tweaking every sail in our wardrobe until we cross the finish line!

Stealth Mode and Ocean Sprint Bonus Points

Sneaky Stealth Mode

Jamaica is doing really well at the moment. Yesterday saw Jamaica Get All Right win the two Ocean Sprint bonus points by a clear 39 minutes ahead of its nearest competitor PSP Logistics, leaving them just 25 miles behind leader GREAT Britain in Race 11.

But Why Is Jamaica Standing Still?

Now the race is becoming really tactical and the Jamaica team have entered stealth mode, meaning they will be invisible to the other boats (and us!) for a 24 hour period as of 06:00 UCT today (I think!) allowing them to disguise any tactical route changes.

How exciting!