My last full day in the Global Ocean Race!

Our last full day at sea and in contrary to the past 3 weeks we are slamming up wind again. We are 80 miles from the cook strait where we get to bear away for the final 100mile stretch home. Going up the west coast of New Zealand has been everything but smooth, putting our class 40 through every condition it doesn’t like.

Firstly drifting in little to no wind where trying to drag the wide rear end of our 40 foot boat is like an ocean plough, skimming over the water is not an option, more trying to push it around which, is not efficient. Now we are going up wind in 25 knots and horrible short and steep waves along the continental shelf where the depth goes from 700 metres to 150 metres deep in the space of a few miles. Here this boat takes the opposite approach, going airbourne off every wave only to come crashing back down landing on its flat bottom. Inside it is almost defening, like being on the inside of a drum, it makes you cringe, hoping the boat stays in one piece. It was exactly these conditions that caused us to drop out of the Transat Jacques Vabre on this boats sistership, just 2 months ago.

The design is fundamentally a surf board with a sail so, going down waves the speeds are excessive for a  boat its size but, similar to a surfer thta takes 10minutes to paddle through surf for a 20second wave, we take a really long time to go the other way up into waves.

For the first time in 4 weeks we started to see signs off life today, firstly we got mobile signal, only briefly as we passed 35 miles from the coast, we still couldnt see New Zealand but as it was Vadafone NZ, i assume it is there. Then shortly afterwards we got caught by surprise by a close visit from a fishing boat…the only human acitivity weve seen since loosing sight of the southern tip of africa at the end of November.

Our current ETA is midday local time tomorrow, but with an unstable weather condition we can’t be sure yet.

All for now from Sam on the last day at sea aboard Cessna Citation