Day 9 Birthday

The day started early for us, at 05:00. We woke up harry for his birthday, Joost en Floris dressed the boat up with balloons and paper ‘slingers’ and Joost baked a real cake during his watch from 02:00 till 05:00. Maybe the result show a small loss in speed during this period but we are happy to pay this price for the man who made this all possible. Harry was surprised and pleased with the attention he got and was drinking his coffee and eating his cake in bed with a big smile on his face. we did all we could to make this day a little special for him. later today we have another small surprise for him which i cannot write about yet as the devil is reading my emails for sure.

For those of you who are also following us on the special race website you can see that we kept our promise to kick some Selene butt. We have them some 10nm behind us at the moment which is comfortable but not enough with still over 400nm to go. Beluga is about 7nm in front of us, we can almost see them but we are not gaining anything at the moment. conditions are not suitable for this. we just wait and wait until they break to late for a corner. I am confident we get them as well.

The conditions are perfect, 20 knots of wind and sunny, even the cold is out of the air and we are no longer wearing mid layers and cloves. it is the waves which make our lives impossible, i do not know where they are coming from, we have a southerly wind but the waves are as high as houses at times, it kills the speed. so when we steer high every 6/7 waves we are thrown from a big one on to the next one and the speed is out of the boat, if we let her run on speed we loose too much height. We do what we can to maintain the speed and hang on beluga for now.

By the way we passed black rock so i did finally do my round around the British and Irish isles. don’t worry i stay on board and intend to finish this race in first place in our class. just too much fun out here, especially when you know what is waiting for me when i return to the daily office routine.

Will anybody recognize us on arrival in Cowes?? Nobody shaved yet and i must say some of us (stoute wouter and dirty harry) should maybe leave it like this.

Back to deck now where I do another hour behind the wheel before I can take 3 hours off. Will we use the spinnaker this race ?

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