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
