Hello world, it has been a busy and mixed day with elation and emotion. It is strange how isolated you can feel on a 70ft yacht surrounded by 22 amazing people. But we are still in the middle of nowhere, no signs of life outside of this yacht other than the occasional email! I was briefing the crew during ‘happy hour’ about why they had no outside communications and we thought it would be nice to have a minute’s silence. Bang on the end of that, a massive "goffer" came over the starboard quarter and covered the helmsman from head to toe! We all burst out laughing, which I think Andy would have appreciated and enjoyed!
The elation was finding out that what we were doing was paying off and that we were only 14 nautical miles from catching Qingdao. I relayed the updated news to the crew at 2200ish local (French) time that we had taken it and our next chase was the 14 nautical miles to catch Garmin in fourth place.
The watch are out there now as I type this working frantically at the grinder with our heavyweight spinnaker flying at full speed!
We had a culinary master team in the galley today producing some pretty amazing food and some more than average breads! We even had apple crumble for pudding. AWESOME.
We started the day with white sails up, the Yankee 2 and full mainsail, then this afternoon the wind abated slightly so we hoisted the heavyweight spinnaker and haven’t looked back. The wind is nicely picking up now and we currently have 23 knots over the deck, flying at 14 knots. We also had a Mission Performance (Missy) record speed today set by one of our Mikes (Moore), a round the world crew member, at 30 knots through the water. Today has seen very good conditions for a bit of surfing! There is nothing like picking your board up and taking it down the beach for a bit of surfing.........no, this is nothing like that.
The amount of power it takes to propel an object of this size through water at that speed is amazing and when you are on board you can feel the acceleration, it is absolutely exhilarating! I have been studying the Gribs (weather files) and trying to work out what whether we are actually going to get and where best to place ourselves for that weather and I have decided that it is worth putting ourselves in some stronger winds and dealing with the uncomfortable ride for a few days more to pull back some miles on the front runners.......Despicable Ash and the Garmin team, theMission Performance Warriors are coming for you!! Haaaaaaarooooooooo (probably a bit of a fail at a war cry) Mission Performance Warriors Out For Now
No comments:
Post a Comment