For Nick and I aboard Artemis, reaching 3 weeks at sea has been marked by a highly eventful 24hours. Starting yesterday morning by breaking our 2nd big spinnaker. In an attempt to loose as little to our competitors as possible we spent the rest of the day alternating between sailing/breaking one spinnaker whie fixing the other down below. Read more…
Thankfully our ground hog day today has had a few extra things thrown in the mix. Yep, its still about 15knots from the ENE, it turns left just after sunset for about 6 hours every night and if you spend more than about an hour on deck in the daytime, your brain starts to boil. However, as the sun came up this morning, the silhouette of another Figaro appeared in front of us. Read more…
The last 24hours have been spent trying to reduce our vulnerability out on the left hand side of the course, to do this, we have been gybing lots and pushing hard to get everything out the boat. We’ve put all our equipment centrally in the boat, disposed of any excess consumables and even combed out nicks afro to increase the windage. Read more…
We are now fully stuck into trade wind sailing which, on face value sounds quite appealing, the sailing we spend a lot of time in Europe dreaming about. Especially the one way type where we don’t have to come back upwind afterwards. However, with the conditions now so stable, we are finding out the harsh reality of being in identical conditions and identical boats is the gains and losses are even smaller. So we are working hard to keep up the pace knowing, that any slip in miles could be impossible to get back.
Yesterday afternoon we finally got some relief from the constant ‘fire hydrant’ walls of water that had been occupying above deck for the first 4 days. Last night and today have presented their own problems but, at least we have been able to dry out the boat and ourselves (especially our feet) for the first time, being able to go on deck with out having to fully kit up is quite a luxury. Not to mention the rest of the boat that was pretty thoroughly soaked by that stage as well.
We finally got around Cap Finistere yesterday morning and are ow heading down the portugese coast. Last night was petty horrible with a constantly changing wind, just on the angle of spinnaker or no-spinnker, we spent the whole night pushing hard, changing sails and worrrying that we were on the wrong sail. Thankfully today, it has calmed dawn a bit and we have managed to catch up on a bit of rest.
We are definitely through the worst of the weather now with the boat currently reaching along in ‘only’ 25kts after 46kts we had last night. Feeling pretty pleased with our first big tactical call, managing to tack with the fleet. We can see most of the boats around us and are happy to be keeping pace and feeling especially happy to be the fastest 24hr boat today! Not really eating enough at the moment, but that should improve as conditions ease up.
Just a quick update, all is well on board. We have settled into a comfortable routine and are happy to be hanging onto the leading back, albeit the back of the leading pack, we are very much still in touch. The start went well, we were happy to come out incident free and our only breakage so far has been one of our 2 weed sticks for removing seaweed off the rudder. We have the small jib up in 20-25knots of wind, its a bit bumpy but not too bad so far. We expect conditions to deteriorate this afternoon and over night though. For the moment we are trying to get as much rest as possible so we aren’t burnt out by the arrival of the bad weather. Read more…
With less than 48hours to the start I can happily report that all is going to plan so far. The final week leading up to a transat can easily be quite stressful, having to prepare ourselves and the boat to be at sea for over 3 weeks, with the capability of fixing any problems we are bound to encounter as well as stay competitive. To add to this there are numerous skipper commitments to attend and pages of check lists to comply with. However this is the most relaxed I’ve felt before a significant race: time will tell if that’s a good thing or not but im defnatelt preferring it more at the moment. Read more…
My comment a few weeks ago about being over prepared for the Transat AG2R was tempting fate so, with 10days to go in the middle of last week, we found our self with a few more problems on our hands. Following a major crash the previous weekend the boat came out the water for some cosmetic repairs and a rig check. Read more…
Copyright © 2012. Sam Goodchild
