Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Well, what a night!
The downwind sleigh ride definitely lived up to all expectations during the night. The true course from North Sails buoy off Barbuda to Nevis meant that there would have been some serious heavy weather spinnaker gybing in darkness, all this on a yacht not that familiar to our intrepid crew!
The fleet are now well spread out even after just 18 hours of sailing. ICAP Leopard and Rambler are well ahead of the rest of the fleet on the water, already well past the northern most part of the race, the Island of St Maarten.
In IRC Class 1, Hydrocarbon Logic are second on the water and 3rd overall on handicap at the moment, changing places with EH01 seemingly at every schedule at the moment. Tonerre de Breskens is in the lead as expected, but Hydrocarbon is nipping at her heels, what a great race already!
Tactics this morning will be interesting as it is now a beat to St Barts, where leaving the island to Port they then head up to St Maarten leaving it to Starboard, but almost certainly this will be a downwind leg as the trade winds have now kicked in and they are getting continuous ENE breeze of 20 knots plus! All this coupled with fantastic sunshine makes England today a very dreary place!
Whilst beating to St Barts, the positions of the leading yachts in class will almost definitely change frequently, this is due to the tracking system estimating the distance to finish based on the heading of the yachts, this will be more accurate once the yacht have passed St Barts this afternoon.
No news from the yacht over night which means that they must be working very hard to get Hydrocarbon moving as quickly as possible.
News from the fleet is that the 90 foot yacht Genuine Risk has retired after breaking their vang/kicker, meaning that they could no longer effectively use their boom.
More to come this afternoon......!!!
