Heather's finally e-mailed

Heathers E-Mail;

I wrote you a nice long email this evening after dinner, went to send it, and 
the email program crashed!

It is currently quite pleasant out. I am wearing just about all my layers minus 
one or two small pieces and am nice and warm. Sarah, one of our RTWers, kindly 
lent me her second pair of Sealskin waterproof socks which have been a godsend 
along with my drysuit. I am always nearly dry when I come off watch minus sweaty 
feet and some condensation around my wrist seals. The poor souls on board who 
are trying to make it in just their Henri Lloyd foulies are mostly miserable as 
the foulies just accumulate water both inside and out and the water temp is 10 
degrees. So a BIG thank you for getting it for me. In fact, Ive written a poem 
about my drysuit that should be up on the crew blog page in the next day or so. 
Not quite Shakespeare, but close enough...

In other news, this leg has been fucking hard. The first ten days it seemed like 
everything that could go wrong did. We had kitemare after kitemare.
Exhaustion set in since we are such limited crew and we kept having to wake each 
other up on our off watches so people started making even more mistakes due to 
fatigue and it seemed like an vicious cycle. But then we couldnt put up 
spinnakers anymore because the sea state got too heavy and the wind angle was 
wrong, and after we blew through a few sheets, everything  settled down and we 
all got a chance to get into a normal routine.

I bruised my ribs being an asshole. Then two days ago, I crushed my fingers putting 

a reef in at the mast. Thought I broke at least one but it turns out its mostly just

a little bit of nerve damage from the crushing and probably will lose a fingernail or 

two? Also got a pretty deep gash on my knuckle which I am trying to keep from getting 

infected. Anyway, was down for half a day and there was a question as to whether or not 

Id be able to helm but everything seems okay now and I am back on the old grind! It gave me 
a chance to rest up which is good because I was definitely  feeling overwhelmed. 
Now my head is back in the game and I am ready for the next 10 days to be 
awesome.