ORCV Melbourne to King Island (M2KI as part of the MMOC)

Guilty!

Many thanks to our newly crowned, Happiest Crew on the Water, 'Audacious'. You can read about that event HERE. Anyway, as I sat down to gnocchi with prawns and chorizo in a white wine sauce, with enough white wine left for the chef and Holly, I got this email from Greg Clinnick about their weight. Talk about making me feel guilty... They were sitting down to Lite n' Easy, fruit salad with a side order of a run at the end.

OK - It's time to play our new game, called Collective Nouns, which started HERE. This image is of the Sydney 38's parked in a row at Geelong. I'm going with Squad of 38s, derived from the US Police, who love the Colt 38 Special. Any advances??????????????????

Reflecting upon their version of Audi Victoria Week, Greg says After a shaky start, our good crew work and aggressive tacking and helming started to pay off with a 3rd place in race 4 and a dead heat for 4th place in the last race in 20+ knot testing conditions. We enjoyed holding out 'Challenge' (and why wouldn't they, eh Dennis?) in the passage race, with them nipping at our heels for a good hour and a half down the Corio Channel. Overall we finished 5th and just in the top half of the fleet - with two Interstate boats and a sprinkling of World Champs, National Champs and professional sailors, 5th was a good solid result. We can take plenty of positives forward into our National Titles, which are on soon.

The Audacious Conspiracy campaign is now in full swing. We leave Melbourne on Wednesday the 10th of February to truck all of our sails and gear up to Pittwater, which is just north of Sydney. For those who may have missed some of the earlier emails, we are chartering a Sydney 38 in Sydney called 'Conspiracy' and using all of our own gear, to sail her in the Sydney 38 Australian Championships, which are going to be held over three days, starting on Friday, February 12. This will be a real test of how we are progressing and will toughen us up for the Victorian Titles, which are going to be run in April of this year.

Last Saturday KD (Ken Dog, who is our tactician) and I went up to Sydney to race on Conspiracy and test out the boat we will be using. Whilst a little older than 'Audacious', she seemed fast enough and our conclusion was that with our newer, faster sails and some sharp crew work, we will have a boat that will be competitive in the regatta. We will now add our own little improvements: like marking the halyards, mast, backstay, and car positions to be able to find our settings quickly and then lighten the boat by removing everything except what the rules require us to carry. Finally we'll scrub the bottom, re-tune the mast, slacken the lower life lines to allow harder hiking, clean the bilges and we are pretty much into it!

Now. With a week and half to go, we pulled out the scales and weighed the crew. We have been dieting since Geelong, in order to get down to the class requirement, which is a combined maximum crew weight of 750kgs or just 83 kgs each on average for 9 crew (Ed - bet Nicky and Katy are smiling right now). We only realised yesterday that the scales are actually reading a couple of kilos light. As a result, we now know that we are about 20 kgs over the limit! If we cannot get down to 750 kgs, someone will have to step off the boat, which would be a disaster for the individual and a disaster for our campaign (Ed - and oh so hard for the Skipper to tap them on the shoulder!!!!!!!!!!!). So the diet is on in earnest (Ed - I'm really going to resist an Oscar Wilde reference - really), as we need to cut the kilos quickly. We are all on strict diets, off the grog and exercising when we can. The official weigh in isn't until 5pm, the day before racing starts and this will mean little, if any, food on that day, until we have been passed as legal. A sauna session and running up the hill in wet weather gear are the fall back position of the day.

So you will see the Audacious crew eating Lite N Easy, fruit salad, lettuce and drinking lots of water over the next 10 days.

Good luck team - you'll be ready for a nice, fattening Ocean Race, to the land of senstaional steak sandwiches and awesome crays when you return. Did I mention CHEESE? No. Well I was too busy stuffing my face. King Island does wicked cheese and the factory is a tasters heaven... Don't forget the plastic bag raffle either. I was told that the steak sandiches were enough to even turn a vegetarian over for the weekend. Don't know and we are PC here at the ORCV. What I can tell you is that the onions definitely ARE tougher than the beef. So there you have it!

BTW - Geelong pics from Mikey their bowman, who is a Rock Band (...Weddings, Parties, Anything... and I can now hear everyone going Boom Boom - Basil Brush).

By John Curnow