Chat Ed : Good evening everyone…Business partners Bob Kerr and Glo Carpenter sailed their boat Serefe 2,700 miles across the Atlantic with a crew of three others. Bob skippered and Glo was ship's cook. But with five people crammed on board the 32-footer for nearly a month, the big question was would the voyage bring Bob and Glo closer or put their relationship under intolerable pressure? They’re here in chat with us now to answer your questions…
Bob : Hello everyone, thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the programme.
Glo : Hi you guys! It was a great experience and I hope you enjoyed watching our journey.
Its Me Alana : Hello Bob and Glo
visi0n : Hey Bob and Glo!
townie boy : what made you want to do this
Bob : It's just something I had wanted to do all my life and it was just finding the right time and place to do it. You always think you need a bigger boat and more money but if you wait too long it will never happen. So we decided that we would go with the boat we got and it worked out well.
john walker : how much sailing experience do you have? did you carry on around the world? What size boat is Serefe?
Bob : The boat is a 32-foot racing yacht it was never designed to cross oceans. I'm a yacht master ocean and I have been sailing yachts for over 30 years but that's the first time I've ever attempted to cross an ocean.
Glo : I am quite a good cook, I have a lot of stamina and I'm an advanced motorist!
Glo laughs!
Bob : And not a very good one!
Bob giggles
Bob : Only joking!
Lil Princess Gillian : where did u sail to and from?
Lil Princess Gillian : how long were you on the ship for?
Bob : We sailed to start with from Plymouth, non-stop to Madeira in the summer of 2003 then we sailed to the Canary Islands, where we left the boat and flew home. We then flew back out again at Christmas and left Las Palmas in the Canaries and sailed non-stop from 23rd November to St Lucia and got there on the 15th December. We spent Christmas tied to a palm tree having a BBQ on the beach in the Caribbean. Then we flew home, then back out to the Caribbean at the end of April and we sailed the boat up through the Caribbean islands - from St Lucia to Martinique and Dominica and Guadalupe and then we went to Montserrat where the volcano blew the island to pieces, then to St Kitts and Tortola where we left the boat and flew home and then arranged for a shipping agent to bring the boat back to England. So we had about 3 months of travelling.
Glo : Yes, we did about 5000 miles.
John B : Did you plan the meals for each day to minimise on the amount of food you took onboard?
Bob : Ask the boss that one!
Glo : I tried to, but it didn't happen because some people don't want to eat if it's rough and they are feeling sick, then when it's calm they eat twice as much!
pugwash : How many tins of Spam did you take?
Glo chuckles at pugwash, we took 10 tins!
Bob : Did we?! I thought that was a joke, I didn't even know we had that onboard!
philli : So... in your boat what kind of luxuries were there? Anything Chocolatey?
Glo : We had energy bars, Mars Bars, Kit-Kats... but they soon got depleted.
Bob : We had a grab bag of goodies for people who were on watch.
Sarge : Where did the cameraman sleep?
Bob : You tell me!
Glo laughs
Bob : There were four of us on the boat plus the cameraman, so we had to 'hotbunk'. The cameraman took up one bunk in the cabin with all his equipment and that only left one bunk in the rear cabin, which we all had to share. It certainly wasn't comfortable.
Glo : It was fantastic. The cameraman was a super guy.
samaii : did u see any whales or dolphins or seals when your were sailing
CFSoBe : Have you ever got up close and felt any animals in the waters?
Bob : Ohh, well, on the crossing of the Bay of Biscay we left Plymouth and for five days we were hard on the wind, it was so, so hard. When we got to the other side the wind died down and we could see land and it was dead calm. I turned the engine off and we were all on board sunbathing and drying our clothes and we saw four pilot whales and as we arrived they dived under the water and disappeared. So we stayed there and they re-appeared about 300m away and all of a sudden they turned round and swam back to the boat - all four of them! They actually touched the boat with their noses and squirted water from their spouts and were grumbling and whistling. It was great.
Glo : Yeah it was totally amazing. We hadn't seen any wildlife at all, then a killer whale came straight towards us from the right hand side and dived under the boat.
Bob : I thought it was going to hit us. They are renowned for sinking yachts, so it was quite scary.
CFSoBe : How do you keep yourselves amused while on the boat.. aside from shooting your programme?
Bob : Believe you me, you really do not have an awful lot of time to do anything but sail, sleep and eat. And our auto-pilot was inoperative so we had to hand steer the boat all the way across the Atlantic. You are so exhausted in your watches that once you've eaten you rarely have time to sleep. On a bigger boat with more crew you can share the workload. But we didn't have that luxury.
Glo : Quite right Bob. We roughed it this time. A bit of luxury next time perhaps!
Andy11 : Did you have a water maker or carry enough for the voyage? - top achievement by the way
Bob : Our boat is very small and we needed about five litres of water per day and the capacity on the boat is 75 litres in the main tanks so I put an extra long-range water tank on board, I put a sea water tap on board for washing dishes, which is a foot operated tap that pumps sea water into the sinks and although it said we had 80 bottles of water on the film, we actually had 250 bottles of water. We also had 8 20-litre plastic containers of water in the main cabin, so we had over a metric tonne of water on the boat.
Glo : I didn't realise we had that much, Bob!
Lisa : don’t you get cabin fever? Lol
Glo : No, not at all. You can go outside and look at the ocean.
alan : how many bottles of gin did you take?
Bob chuckles
Glo : Well... we had a few litres, but not enough!
simon : Were there any times when a capsize or MOB was on the cards?
Bob : I think the biggest danger was on the pre-trip across the Bay of Biscay where the sea depth goes from four thousand metres to one hundred and 50 metres and we were running a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal. Fifty knots of wind and the seas were 40-50 feet high. It was 14.8 knots at top. At that time, if someone had turned the tiller the wrong way, there was a possibility that the boat could have broached and turned over. Fortunately that did not happen.
Burnet : why didn't you try to fishing so get some fresh food?
Glo : Hehe.. We had an aqua-gen which meant that as the propeller went round it created electricity for us which meant if we'd have fished it could have got entangled in our lines.
mags : Glo, how fantastic to swim in the middle of the Atlantic, was it cold?
Kevin : were you not worried about sharks when you went for your swim?
Glo : No, it was warm mags. I didn't manage to touch the bottom though! The sharks didn't even come into my mind. I knew someone would take me on board if I got into difficulties.
Chat Ed : Our time with Bob and Glo is almost up, so last few questions now...
stan10 : why no lifejackets on mid Atlantic
Bob : We had life jackets the whole time and wore them on every night watch and we had life harnesses and were clipped on for every night watch. Through the day we only wore life jackets if it was really rough.
RRXX : what was the strangest thing you have ever seen in the ocean?
Bob : We saw loads of shooting stars - one night we counted 42. I saw a meteor too, which was amazing. It was like a movie, it had a flaming tail. I was like Ohh my God! A huge ball of orange flame and it took my breath away. When we got to St Lucia I mentioned it to another skipper and he had seen it too. That was just something else.
Glo : When I was on late watch at about 3am when everyone else was asleep I saw a cloud surround the boat; an eerie cloud. No one seemed to see it except me. It was like we were encompassed in our own world.
Bob : It really was special at nights.
Chat Ed : Our time with Bob and Glo is up now folks…
Bob : Thank you all for watching and coming online. It was a tremendous experience and from my point of view all of the crew were great and the editing of the programme didn't give them the praise that they deserve I would sail anywhere with them all again.
Glo : Thank you everyone. Without the crew and Bob it would not have happened. If any of you ever get the chance to do it go for it.
Simon E : Congratulations to all of you, great job
jordan080412 : bye
townie boy : thanks bob and glo nice talking to you and well done
Bob leaves the room
Glo leaves the room
