Rudi Rudiger aboard Assa Abloy describes the tense situation at 0500 on 1 October, 90 miles west of the Canary Islands

Concentrate, step gently, click, click, click, trim very slowly, barely a whisper…. the cat and mouse game is very slow but high-strung at the moment. It is night but full moon. Seas calm, light shifty winds, spinnakers setting lightly.

After a week of noisy wet sailing, five of us are now fighting for boat lengths mostly within sight of each other. Roy is steering, anticipating every little puff while distance and bearing to the other boats is quietly relayed to him. His mind is crunching thousands of computations per minute trying to figure a way to cover all the angles for the three just behind us, and gain on Tyco just ahead.

Magnus watches them like a wise hawk through the binoculars while I read out the distances on the radar. At the same time, I’m downloading the latest weather models and updated surface pressure/wind tendencies. Then I run numerous scenarios on the computers to figure short term and long term goals. Mikey is perched like a cat on the boom scanning the horizon for signs of wind lines. Sydney is leeward trimming the kite like a fisherman trying to catch that elusive trout. Guillermo is watching the trim and looking for clouds that can be our friend or our worst enemy. Both him and Neil were here not too long ago on Club Med, and know all too well how the Canary Islands can suck you in to wind holes.

In the last hour, we picked up some better breeze, and can see the three behind us slipping out of sight. Even the radar can’t pick them up. Everyone waits pensively for the next sked. In it comes…..it shows we only gained one mile on them. How could that be? I quickly plot them on the computer. As I’m doing it, the wind shifts quickly to the north…gybe.

Sure enough, the others got the shift first and had gybed away first. On distance to the mark they are only a few miles behind, but the tricky chess game of sailing is all about angles and pressure, and we’re looking pretty good in that area right now…. time will tell…, got to wait until the next sked and keep working our boat for every boat length.

Cheers for now,

Rudi Rudiger