So, down it came for the second time in so many hours! The third time it went up it was flying perfectly for around four hours and then both sheets detached. The spectra strop had failed, so a little later it was again on the deck again!
After coming out of Ushant yesterday morning we were determined to catch Visit Seattle and overhaul it. The team was five miles ahead and as darkness came upon us we began heating it up and gaining on it. It is now slightly on our port quarter as I write this at 0300 local (French) time. Hopefully by the time I have sent this blog out we will be south of them and it should reflect in the Race Viewer!
I would like to take this opportunity to explain to the Mission Performance Warriors Supporters about my first tactical decision on night one of the leg.
We had three Traffic Separation Schemes (TSS) to safely navigate around, the first was Dover Straits which there is only one way to attack from the Thames Estuary when going west. The second one is Casquets, off the Channel Islands. This one can be taken to the south or north, the third is Ushant off the Brest peninsula of France.
I had decided that from the weather forecasts we had been given that we would have more wind on the UK coast and therefore initially planned to go to the north of the Casquets Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) and use the favourable winds on the UK coast before crossing the English Channel towards the Ushant TSS.
I later realised that the winds in the mid channel were also pretty good but then looked at the tides and discovered that when we got to the narrow gap between the Channel Islands and the TSS we would have a foul tide running at around 5 knots. Whereas on the North side of the TSS, although still against us it wouldn’t be nearly as bad. By this time I had lost the Automatic Identification System (AIS) contacts to the rest of the fleet so wasn’t sure if any of them were taking the northerly route. Sometimes, when racing anything you just have to take a chance!
The long and short of it is we had a faster run with the winds we had from the Casquets TSS to the Ushant TSS and it turned out that seven of the fleet ended up there together anyway!
So, while working hard with the medium weight spinnaker last night I took the opportunity to coach some of the Warriors on the finer points of helming under kite at night and it seemed to be received really well.
Our 'happy hours' are going well with everyone sharing their gripes and coming up with suggestions on how to improve our lot. We even had carrot cake today. The food on board has been excellent throughout and I am very sure that it will continue that way!
We had dolphins swimming with us for much of the day today, there is nothing like dolphins to lift spirits, not that ours are down.
Until Tomorrow Mission Performance Warriors OFN (out for now).
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