Race to Rio, Line Crossing Initiation
2nd May, 2012It has been very difficult to distinguish the days during the last week; with the wind light, everyday bright and hot and every night sparkling above and below us the only thing to distinguish one day from the next is who is cooking… and even then Darragh cooked three days and three 5 star meals in a row.
Another way to see that we are making progress is when you write an entry in the trip log the latitude was always slightly less and it was on the 8th day of our trip that the figure hit 0 and strange things began to happen…
Around lunch time on said day we were ordered to furl away the sails and stop the engine… soon after issuing these orders Conor and Derek seemed to disappear leaving Coyote, Darragh and myself in the cockpit. Next thing you know Neptunes’ side kick appears out of nowhere; this guy is dress in a cowboy hat, has straw hair as black a night, a big knife and a very bad attitude. He orders us to the bow of the ship and who is there to meet us?? Neptune himself with his blue cloak and thick white beard and hair (that seemed to fall off every now and again), decorated with a crown and a trident of fire!! this guy wasn’t very nice either but he did keep his side kick from running us through!
Instead the three of us who hadn’t sailed over the equator before took it in turn to stand on the edge of the ship strapped in a harness connected to the spinnaker pole while the angry side kick read a list of sea faring sins we were guilty of from a scroll. For each sin we got a putrid concoction of days old, festering in the sun left overs thrown at us usually in the face! This stuff was vile! I cannot begin to describe the gag inducing smell. But once the last sin was read and the last handful of evil thrown we were ordered into the sea where we were dunked and made our sacrifice to the ever merciful Neptune!
Neptunes mercy only goes so far as Darragh found out. With his mouth gaping wide open as he passed the harness back to the henchman Neptune appeared out of nowhere and emptied some of the vileness on to Darragh and I am afraid to report it went in his mouth and up his nose inducing quite and array of primeval sounds and expressions. The ceremony also saw Coyote get a short full of cocktail and he made a bunch of wild noises of his own.
…and with that Neptune and evil henchman were gone, leaving only a smelly deck to wash, three smelly newly initiated crew members and a beard on the deck!
Now all we can hope is that Neptune smiles down on us with mercy and grace as our fuel runs low, the wind stay light and Coyote keeps setting fire to his cooking.
2041 Crew








