It has been a frustrating few days watching Bel and Safran pulling ahead of us. The twenty odd mile gap we began with two days ago has been extended into more than 110 miles now. This can be attributed for the most part to them having more pressure ahead of us (more than 2kts of wind more than us) but Bubi and I have been pulling our hair out trying to keep pace. Still, "what goes around, comes around" and now it looks although we may retrieve some of what has been lost in the next few hours as finally Safran is showing signs of slowing whilst we are still in the breeze at pace. With luck we can get ourselves back into the double figures over tonight and tomorrow morning.
Mike Golding Yacht Racing
The sailing is fairly simple at present, we are on a port tack sailing a speeds between 16 and 22 kts. It is fairly wet on deck but it is also becoming very warm and clammy below. We need to have a clear up of wet socks and smelly mid layers as it all beginning to hum a bit below decks - we could really do with a few dry days to get our clothing sorted. We have it seems spent the entire race to date at high angles of heel and with water everywhere. This is not especially comfortable and when either of us are not "on watch we tend to opt for the relative comfort of the bunk - where you’re not constantly fighting with the boats motion and angle. Still we have a rhythm going, which is affording each of us a good amount of rest and with more time available we are eating better than during the first half of the race.
We have finally got the B&G working with some wind data, without any method of calibrating the numbers are all a bit off but having even wrong numbers does help a lot. Generally the boat is in good order considering the drumming she took in the storms of the first week - the jobs list for the delivery crew is really very short (so far!) and we are now just days away from passing into the Caribbean Sea. I am really looking hard at our tactical options and seeing what can be done to get back to the leaders, the good news is that there are still real opportunities yet to come in this race.
