Sorry for the delay in getting back to you all after our retirement from the Brittany Ferries 1000 and many thanks for all your supportive messages, especially as it was a little tricky to follow the action. It was great to be able to give some real time feedback on our progress though and I can assure you that for the Transat Jacques Vabre (TJV) the coverage of the race will be significantly slicker and in general things will be a lot easier to follow!
After the obvious initial disappointment that accompanied our retirement from the Brittany Ferries 1000, I am now pretty satisfied with our work. Tanguy and I have an excellent boat which is going to give us a great chance of competing right at the front of the fleet in the TJV this November.
The next few weeks are going to be as busy as ever, we need to remove around 90 Kgs from the bulb to reduce our righting moment down to the maximum allowed. This will obviously also reduce the overall weight of the boat and for a predominantly downwind race like the TJV, we should be even more competitive!! Alongside this major job we also have to repair the starboard rudder. After further inspection it seems that the problems here all stemmed from one small weld failing. Again, although very annoying, we are pretty relieved it wasn’t anything more serious. We also have lots of small jobs to complete and a few electrical issues to iron out. All this work is being carried out down in La Rochelle and the boat should be back in the water next week.
As with the Route du Rhum and Mini Transat, it is necessary to complete a 1000 mile qualifying passage for the TJV. The only real downer of our retirement from the Brittany Ferries 1000 is that we would have ticked this box. However, looking on the bright side (as seems necessary with this sport sometimes) we need some more miles under our belt before the Transat anyway and it will be good to test the boat after the latest modifications and generally get some more ‘real’ training in.
In the meantime I’ve been back in England concluding my RORC racing with Clemency on Jos Of Hamble the Beneteau First 34.7. After two wins early in the season, we were keen to maintain our record and go for the ‘hat trick’. I’ve attached an extract from Clemency’s report but in brief we had a great race in light winds and not only managed to win the doublehanded class but also managed to finish 2nd overall and first British boat, a fantastic finish to the season.
I’ll be in touch over the next few weeks as Tanguy and I get ready for our qualifier and we also hope to announce a few technical partners who have signed up to the project, most of them will be familiar names to all be now though!!
Cheers, Nick
