Finishing best of the British, 8th

Nick Bubb and Tanguy de Lamotte crossed the line in Salvador de Bahia in 8th place early Tuesday morning. Bubb became the best of 8 British skippers.

The two used 23 days, 17 hours, 38 minutes and 30 seconds at the average speed of 7.62 knots on the 4400 nautical mile long regatta.

- All good. More news and hairy scary pictures to follow. Off to bed, writes Nick in an SMS.

Day 23: Hanging on

Around 400 miles to go and things are OK onboard. We have successfully saved a bit of water from the rations and we have three decent meals left each.

As we get further down the Brazilian coast (we are now level with Recife) the SE trades start to back a little and we now have a more pleasant E’ly to take us towards Salvador. We’ve been with the code 5 for the last 24 hours but have just changed to the big spi. – all the way to the finish we hope! However there is quite a bit of breeze forecast for tonight and we have just been headed massively by a big black cloud and shock horror it is raining!!

Not really in the mood for getting wet will save that for two days time, yes two days or maybe even a bit less if all goes well! It is midday UTC Sunday 25th now and we should arrive in the morning on Tuesday 27th,  just a few hours under 24 days racing. We are keeping a close eye on the cracks on the starboard rudder and have effected a slight re-enforcement with some lashings and an excellent Spanish windlass. No idea if this problem is going to develop into something more serious or not and as I said yesterday there isn’t really anything we can do other than try not to overload the rudder. Instead of steering the boat fairly vigorously through the waves we are letting her find her own way a little more, slightly slower but a lot safer!!

OK, it has stopped raining now so it’s safe for me to go on deck.

Cheers, Nick

PS. Just popped back to nav station after 4 sail changes, wind v shifty under the clouds….almost like the dreaded Doldrums! after two days v slowing easing miles on the boats behind, I suspect we have lost most of that lead in 1 hour! The battle continues….

Day 22: Exploding sails and cracking rudder

Well this isn’t quite so much fun, sailing close to the wind (in every sense) around 70 degrees off. We are making great progress though towards the Brazilian coast averaging around 9 – 10 knots. The sea state is a little lumpy and we have a 15 knot SE’ly, additionally we have had to get our foulie’s back out again as there is water on deck!

Some minor good news from last night, for the time being we have kept the wolves from the door and despite closing up to within 6 miles, we have now eased out to a 12, 14 and 15 mile lead on 9th, 10th and 11th. We believe they are all sailing within sight of each other, just to leeward of us. Further back we have done more good work on 40 DEGREES, who after the Doldrums was around 30 miles behind and are now 61. This is certainly a leg of incremental gains and hard graft. The two boats that passed us in the Doldrums have maintained a steady lead on us, of just over 80 miles away for the last 36 hours, occasionally we close up a bit and vice versa.

Right onto the bad news, at around 0500 UTC last night our genoa exploded. This is the largest of our classic upwind sails and has been up ever since leaving the Doldrums, we were expecting to use her for another 500 miles too. It was all fairly boring as far a dramas go. I was just sat down to leeward about to adjust the trim when there was a small bang and she split open from luff to leech (front to back) about 2/3 rds of the way up. Several other small rips developed immediately as we semi furled her and dropped the bundle to deck. This is obviously a big blow but we seem to have similar speed with the smaller solent as long as the wind doesn’t drop…… We may also lose out when the wind starts to free us and go back round to the SSE in 36 hours time., although hopefully we can straight to the blast reacher! Either way, as we are not able to fix this kind of serious damage at sea, we will just have to adjust our course according to the sails we have left and try to optimise things bearing in mind where our competitors are heading.

More worryingly, I noticed some cracks on the starboard rudder yesterday morning. At the moment they are relatively small and are around the top fitting which attaches the blade to the back of the boat. There does not appear to be any unusual movement of the blade there but the cracks do appear to be v slowly creeping. Again if this was to get serious there isn’t anything we can do at sea. We have the port rudder obviously but the two are not transferable so we would have to back off significantly to keep the boat upright and the windward (port) rudder in the water. We have around 600 miles left to run before we gybe and head inshore to Salvador so lets hope it holds together for another two and a half days! I don’t even want to consider how heart breaking it would be if…

This gradual fatigue of the boat does serve to highlight how long this race is. It is 50% again of your usual trans-Atlantic and by the time we arrive, we will have sailed around 1/5 th of the classic round-the-world route. We will also have been at sea for around 25 days which is 1/3 rd of the time we took during the Oryx Quest in 2005 (non-stop around the world). All being well our current ETA is sometime around midday UTC on Tuesday (27th November).

Fingers crossed for many reasons now!

Cheers, Nick

Day 21: Four days to go

Pretty frustrated onboard. Especially as the guy who went into the doldrums 20 miles ahead (APPART CITY) is now 3rd, and 9, 10 and 11 is catching us!
Working very hard but it seems they have slightly more favourable conditions a little to the west. Should be the other way round according to forecast, normality etc.

As I analyse the last few days, unbelievable what has happened. We have really lucked out. Oh well quit moaning. Look at Mike Golding and Loic Peyron in the 60s, 1st and 2nd to 5th and 8th.

Good to be essentially across the Atlantic and into the Southern Hemisphere. Passed over E at 0540 UTC, had Neptune some Mumm Champagne and last of the Haribo. Champagne tasted good!

Sailing with genoa and full main, looking forward to wind backing over next 24 hours so we can get going with the code 5 or as I like to call it the ‘blast reacher’, does what it says!

Hope alls well in real world, just over 4 days to go. Have a great weekend.

Best Nick

PS. The Telegraph ran a story a couple of days ago with our man Nick in it. Read all about it!

Day 20: Hanging on to 8th

Rolling along now but still a bit nervous…

Big, big loss to the others but thankfully the next pack is still behind but only just…
Mood is better onboard and we have ‘discovered’ another 3 litres of drinking water.
Sorry for bad news all, touching distance with 4th to 8th is hard to take especially when 4th and 5th swallowed up 3rd. Could be fighting for the podium instead of battling to keep a top 10. We are having fun, going well and beating a lot of good guys.

Still a long way to go.

Doldrums at their worst

We are slowly being crushed by this seemingly endless black hole…………we are west of the track the leaders took and have lost many miles to them and yet now we are losing miles to those behind us who are just west of us. Yesterday was a very slow today but tonight we have only managed to move 8 miles south in 8 hours and GROUP  PARTOUCHE is now 60 miles ahead and VECTEUR PLUS 35 miles…….

We are now 8th with a very big bunch just behind, sure we can still catch the guys ahead but this is more painful than I could ever describe in words, totally stuck in the squeezed middle!!!!!!!! Over 100 miles lost to Giovanni the leader in 24 hours. A whole night of drifting aimlessly whilst others near by blast along at 8 or 9 knots. We clearly had the door ahead of us slammed in our face with only the top five allowed through and now once again the far west looks like the winning option.                               

I don’t really want to say anything else right now other than we intend to use all the frustration and anger this last 36 hours has caused to fight all the way to the finish. As a team, Tanguy and I are as strong as ever, and always knew that this could happen, we will just have to live with it and move on…….

We have a little breeze now from the SE so maybe, just maybe, things are looking up.

Cheers, Nick

…………..add to that we have ten meals left, some soup, a few tins and about 20 litres of water with around 1150 miles still to go……not great either!

Yetta ‘nother tough night

After another relatively uneventful day, the night was a bit more spicy!! Pretty much the same as the previous one but with less thunder and more sail changes….not all of them planned! In amongst all of this were periods of relative calm, where we just had to sit there in the pitch black and wait for whatever was coming……makes sail selection tricky!! During one particularly nice squall where, obviously, we had the big kite up again, the halyard snapped at the top of the rig sending the near 200 square metre sail into the water. Sadly the remaining end of the halyard then dropped back down into the mast. Five minutes later we had the enormous sail back on deck in one piece (not easy with such lightweight sail cloth and a whole bunch of stanchions waiting to rip her up). We re-hoisted using the mast head genoa halyard and quickly sorted an external system as a replacement, all that remianed was to send Tanguy up to the top of the rig to attach it! Anyway, we got it all done and 30 minutes later we had transferred halyards and were back in full racing mode.

However, our frustration was complete when 20 mintes later the wind headed us and we had to drop the spinnaker to go to the solent! The only consolation was that with the wind was going towards the SE, ao there is a chance that we are nearing the end of the doldrums and approaching the SE trade winds. The doldrums normally stop at around 5N and we are now down at 3N.  However, the last radar image I saw showed some doldrum-esq conditions as far as 2N but hopefully we will be clear by tonight, fingers crossed.

We have temporarily lost our hard fought battle for 6th to GROUPE PARTOUCHE. They are way out west, in theory closer to the finish, but they are still around 40 miles north of us. So ,as we get into the trades we should be able to ’smoke over the top of them’. It looks liike APPART CITY has had pretty much the best luck of the fleet over the last few days; their high risk easterly course has seen them join the battle for a podium position. We are around 30 miles ahead of the next pack but still have high hopes of catching the leaders; we are a fast reaching boat and with 1100 odd milesto the finish, it is still a decent length race by anyones standards!!

Nick

Day 17: Tough night

Very tough squally night, thunder and lightning, all sails on deck, rope everywhere. One minute we are doing 20 knots the next 0. Very lumpy sea, very humid, torrential rain for what felt like hours then intense heat.  Every item of clothing is soaked, although I am not sure whether from the rain, the sea or from our own perspiration………this is definately the doldrums. Haven’t really stopped yet (touchwood) and we’ve maintained our position relative to the fleet. Giovanni seems to have taken off again this morning, 40 miles in the last 4 hours and 30 minutes.

We are under attack from all the over the place behind but at the same time APPART CITY seems to be within our grasp…. again those in the west will look good on the rankings but if they emerge from the doldrums at the same time as those in the east, their angle to the wind will be tighter and therefore slower down the Brazillian coast.

Currently, Heading: 195 degrees Speed: 4 knots Sails: genoa and full main

Day 16: Doldrums ahead

Well the front runners have all shown their hands and we look set to be just west of the leaders going into the Doldrums. All as we wanted, so good news there. Doldrums not looking huge at the moment but still happy with our position, if we all come out as we have gone in, I’d be surprised though.

Personally speaking I’m hoping we come out a little cleaner and closer to the front!! We could really do with some rain to wash both ourselves and to clean up the mess where Tanguy sits for dinner!

After some persistent engine problems we seem to be managing the situation (touch wood, finger crossed etc) and our big spi, which has been, getting endless abuse is just about holding up to. Several repairs are damaging the aesthetics but she is still big and beautiful to me.

We seem to easing ahead very slowly of most of the pack behind and we have been consistently putting a mile or two on 40 DEGRESS (n 7th) over the last day or two. Marc Emig and Bertrand de Broc in 4th are around 40 miles ahead and APPART CITY is around 20.

With fresh SE trade winds expected after the Doldrums, we are hoping our powerful beast will rise to the challenge and make some gains for us on the home stretch. Lets just see how the Doldrums go first though.

Cheers, Nick

Day 16: Engine problems and big leap forward

The weekend has been filled with diesel fumes and motor repairs for Nick Bubb and Tanguy de Lamotte on board Novedia Group/S.E.T. Environnement. Nick and Tanguy are now in 5th place – they are officially listed as 4th, but as Italia Telecom currently is listed as ”position unknown” we suspect that they still are up front.

Word from Tanguy Monday morning:

- A few lines to tell you that it look like we have solved the problem with the engine. We now have full charge and the engine ran “normally” last night.

- One thing Nick did not tell you in the last report were that we had to fix the tack of our big spi. The webbing were damaged so I decided to go out on the pole with my climbing harness to stitch some new webbing on, but as I was starting on the first one the remaining of the last webbing ripped and the kite flew backward behind the main and I was left alone at the end of the pole… we dropped it and put the medium spi up very quickly and I started the repair on deck: 3 new webbings on the sail tack! and 20 minutes later the big spi was up again. It has not come down since.