Day 7 - Update

I can’t believe we are at sea week today it has gone by so quickly and the first few days are all a bit of a blur. Now that we have settled into routine I thought I would give you an idea of what life is like on board. Each day we row for 12 hours each are consuming in the region of 6,000 calories a day. To fuel our bodies we need to eat lots of high calorie food, this comes in the form of mainly dehydrated food sachets. Each morning around 10:00 we are issued a ration pack for the next 24 hours, it contains 3 meals, some chocolate bars, drink sachets, packs of nuts or raisins, tissues and biscuits. If you managed to eat everything you would consume around 4-5,000 of your required calories, nobody has managed this so far. As for the quality of the food we have developed a 3 tier hierarchy ranging from the green packs which you will just about force feed yourself to the British Army ration packs which we might just have a mutiny over! In the middle are the orange packs which are pretty good, especially the ‘spag bol‘ and the custard with berries. Unfortunately about 60% of all our rations are the least favored green packs and we only have 22 of the Army packs remaining, the plan is to spoil ourselves each sat with these for the next few weeks they are so good I would nearly join the Army!! The other bad news is that it seems most of the green packs have been contaminated by petrol or diesel so it makes all the chocolate bars unpalatable and some of the meals even more disgusting than normal. This should not be a problem as we have stockpiled all the uneaten meals but if we are out here for more than 45 days we will have to eat the tainted food. Progress will the slow for the next couple of days then we hope to pick up the trade winds and if our weather man Stokey is correct, and he usually is, we will see 25knts on our stern sometime on Wednesday, then we will knock some serious mileage up. Mike