Day 12 A much better day

My last message was somewhat depressing, but today was a much better day. What a couple of hours of sleep, dry socks and a clean t shirts can do :-). During the last night we damaged our genoa no 2 badly and we needed the sail to keep the pace. We brought it inside the boat soaking wet and tried to do a quick repair which failed. We were all tired, the night was pitch black and decided to continue with genoa no 3.

We had no energy to fight with this mountain of wet and salty sailing cloth. the next morning after my dry sock and clean t-shirt I started to work with leading sail maker Reima on the sail. it took us several hours to dry, clean, patch and stitch the sail by hand. We hoisted the sail immediately and have only changed it some hours ago when we rounded Bishop rock and the wind got really light.

We are back in home water now, the English South coast we know and has no secrets to us. Under genoa 1 and full main we are now sailing towards the finish line which it is still some 150nm away. We are looking forward to reach Cowes and have shower and a steak. Just for a little while we were distracted by these thoughts but now all back in racing mode not to waste our good position in the field. As it stands we will not arrive first in class which is somewhat disapointed but we are only hours away from Beluga after racing close to 1900 nm, not bad for a boat which is 4 ft shorter. Let’s see what we can still do about this. The South coast can be full of surprises.

Tomorrow will be finish day, one more report to follow and this journey comes to an end. would it be a problem for us if we had to to another round?? Probably not. Life at sea is good, we could probably just continue another week or two if we had to. sailing became daily routine for us just like answering emails or going to the office.

Tomorrow more..