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Enjoying the battle

November 19 2008

At last, two minutes to breath! I’ve just come off deck having peeled our largest spinnaker; it’s a great feeling to be under max sail. The first few days have been testing to say the least with a tricky first day followed by big wind and close racing, all of which have of course been coupled with a few technical challenges onboard.

After a good start we sped round the inshore course with the lead pack only to sail in into a huge wind hole as the gradient breeze battled with sea breeze. One wrong call as we tried to steal a march on the fleet and we were toast, out the back in no wind as the others sailed off, how depressing! We were left with no choice but to pick up the pieces and battle on, which is exactly what we have done with good effect so far.

With keel issues from the word go, again I was busy early on. This time the new ram boots have been fine but the keel kept easing down from max cant as soon as we loaded the boat up. After much fiddling around we discovered it was due to some dirt in the release valves and after a thorough clean up, everything seems to be ok now. A few small repairs here and there but touchwood, Kosatka is holding up well.

My personal highlight of the race so far was the other morning; big rolling seas, overcast sky, freezing water, 40 knots of breeze, A6 (fractional spinnaker) and 2 reefs, fully stacked aft, Mikey on the pumps Jez trimming, me on the wheel.  We were just blasting along with prolonged periods pf over 30 knots boat speed and a max speed of 34 knots. However this was then followed by near disaster as soon after the watch change, Mikey and I were in the bow bailing out when we heard the boat take off, down what must have been a huge wave, as we hit the bottom, with nowhere to go, the boat had to either roll into the breeze and broach or Chinese gybe (an accidental gybe). Unfortunately the helmsman was powerless to control her and we ‘chinesed.’ There was carnage on deck and down below. Sail stack in the water, keel on the wrong side, crew clipped on half underwater, runners on the wrong side, boom in the air, spinnaker in the rig, boat half under water, kit everywhere down below as various missiles launched themselves at the off watch. After what seemed like an eternity we sorted the keel out, completed the gybe, got the kite down and gybed back to our proper course, all very relieved still to have a rig in the boat!!

Anyway enough stories for now, I must go, only 2 hours till I need to be up again. We are currently engaged in a thrilling battle to try to beat both Telefonica boats and maybe even Puma to the scoring gate tomorrow afternoon. We should gybe north later on today and the crew are all very excited at warming up. For me, my feelings are slightly different, this will be the last of the southern ocean for a while, which unofficially starts at 40S and I do feel a tinge of regret at not following the old course and heading south for Australia.  There are certainly new challenges ahead however so I better prepare for that, if we beat Telefoncia Black and Delta Lloyd to this scoring gate we will move up to 6th overall so motivation is high….. and Green Dragon is only 40 miles directly in front of us, under 2 hours away!!