Dearest Duffy love,

Sorry I've been so shocking on the contact front but please believe when I say a postcard is winging its way towards you as we speak. Well. Almost. But I dont think Ill get much internet next month and none at all in June so Skypage is out and facebook will gradually disappear I believe. Sorry dearest, I shall have to try and savour and ration some phone calls..

I will try and excuse myself with the fact that I have been offshore for four of the last five weeks and during that one week onshore the yachtmaster theory was so unnecessarily knackering that I barely had the energy to go clubbing never mind skyping etc.

The sailing has been such a blast-  there have been two weeks of offshore training, doing things like boat handling etc and then it all came together in the last two weeks of our mile builder. Of all the sailing that was the most epic- twelve days on a 55 foot yacht with an all female crew and our much enduring skipper.

We were very undermanned (quite literally) which meant that although we had loads of excess space to stretch out in, we had to make do in a boat that usually took around 10 people to crew with half of that. On the upside it was great practice for doing singlehanded reefing and de-reefing or sail hoists and drops and tacks etc, but it meant we had really conservative sail plans and and wouldnt go quire as fast as I would have liked. Speed demon that I am... Especially since we had basically no wind for those two weeks we ended up motoring up and down the east coast- by the end of it we had stopped going into ports and were just traversing around imaginary waypoints which was, quite frankly, soul destroying. After motoring around for 120 hours in what was essentially a glorified water taxi, we had all had enough and threw the towel in as soon as we had covered the necessary miles. Other than that though, the whole trip was spectacular.

Because they were so few of us we worked on watches of two with two hours off/two hours on. Knackering as it was, when there were very few nights of decent sleep, we turned into a floating WI and really looked after each other. Do you remember the skintight shiny black thermals you helped me pack? Im became horribly attached to them to the point of living in them and within days it had got nicknamed my ninja suit. After that we went in a downhill spiral of silliness- Team Ninja all had ninja suits and we came up with a ridiculous ninja laws; referring to each other by ninja names (Captain Ninja, Optimistic, Casual, Scottish and yours truly, Proto), to dolphins as sea monsters, storms as sea dragons etc. Our second law was to never wake someone up off watch without offering them food or drink or sustenance of some kind- it became routine to hear 'Proto, Proto, ten minutes till watches. Would you like tea or coffee? Your cake is on the fridge'. When we told the boys they totally took the piss, but our skipper was mighty glad he'd got our boat. Not to mention there was superb cooking all round- the mark of a good meal was whether it 'sent someone into the bilges' which meant that they were so full they werent capable of standing up and would have to lie down even though this meant they would have their heads on the hygienically questionable and indubitably manky bilges under the floorboards. Of course half of the problem with food was that we ate out of dog bowls (Im not kidding. We decided we had been reduced to the level of animals- sleep, wake up and sail/play, eat until we got sick out of dog bowls and occasionally get fed treats) and then quantities were very difficult to judge. By the seventh day when I was trying to cook Bolognaise in a kitchen where the hobs swung around, the boiling pans were tipping almost vertically and everything moved all the time, including yourself we concluded that no one could call themselves a real chef until they had cooked in a kitchen that moved and tried to make food in dog bowls look appealing. Eat your hearts out Jamie and Gordon!

To get practice as skipper we each had to lead and skipper a passage and whilst most people had fairly uneventful days I managed to take charge on a couple of days where literally everything that could have gone wrong attempted to- the boom broke as we were sailing and about to tack, lobster pots got caught around the keel at 3am and a little while the engine failed whilst we were in so little wind sailing would have been impossible. The most exciting was at 4am one morning my watchmate was on the helm whilst I attempted to bake a cake for the next watch and when I came up on deck she announced we were being chased. The obvious conclusion to this was we were blatantly being chased by pirates so we knocked the engine on and tried to outrun them. Shortly after we realised we were being chased by the Harbourmaster- water police- and sheepishly slowed down to get 'pulled over'. They hadnt appreciated being called pirates at all.

Thus by the end of about 12 days what little sanity and maturity I had arrived with disappeared. The practical jokes had escalated from dropping cookies into the skipper's cabin through a hatch and arranging fruit in amusing shapes on his bunk to hoisting wellies and shorts up the mast by the halyard. Embarrassingly for us when we hoisted his shorts up the backstay like a set of highly unoriginal American teenagers, we hadnt considered how to get down again. Eventually he (with minimal amusement) strapped me into a harness chair and had the others winch me up as I clambered over the boom to grab his shorts with a boathook. Awkwardly as I was halfway up a boat full of teenage girls drifted past to the sight of me halfway up a boat reaching for some shorts as an unamused and immature set of adults below gazed on. It wasnt our finest hour.

Im sorry my dearest to confuse and bore you with all these nautical things. Its been bizarrely my life for the last three months and so jokes like when hoisting the mainsail
'You keep going till you get it up'
'I can't! I've tried and I cant get it up any higher'
'Alright I'll grind if its stiffer than usual'
...somehow arent quite as usual.

miss you like gingers miss ninjas
your mistress xxxxx