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
