Tuesday 18 November 2008 03:27
Delta Lloyd – Matthew Gregory (Navigator)
I thought I’d be feeling better by today. I was right.
We changed sails earlier today to our high clew reacher - "the R1”. We are sailing in 25 to 40 knots of wind and 8 meter high waves. It’s a wild and bumpy ride. The surf is up.
Our sail change come with some adventure. We use our J4, a small jib fore sail that flies on a furler off of our staysail halyard, almost all of the time, when sailing down wind.
During our sail change the tack pin that connects the furling unit, and sail, to the deck of the boat broke. Imagine sailing in 30 knots of wind with the head (top corner) and clue (back corner) of the sail still attached, while the tack (bottom corner) whips around violently with an 3kg metal furling unit attached to the tail end of it.
As we tried to wrestle the sail to the deck someone said “boy, this is dangerous” ... he was exactly right.
I’ve been dreading writing the blog entry to describe the strategy and route to India. I don’t think that I can do it with a simple screen shot and words alone. I think that I’d need a 20 slide powerpoint deck and live commentary, to capture the complete strategy ... this route is complicated and has about 5 moving parts.
Being adaptable and managing risk is going to be the winning solution in this leg. To give a simple version:
Right now we are sailing on the backside of a low pressure system. (as shown in the current position picture) This system is allowing us to get east very quickly, due to the south west winds in this section of the system.
We will head almost due east and past the scoring gate. For this leg our mid scoring gate is the Longitude 58 E. The furthest boats to the east will pick up the most points at this mid-leg gate.
The transition from the north westerly winds that are driven by the low pressure system and the east trades could be a bit rough.
I’ll spend the next several days working out the details of how we are going to play the shift from one weather system to the next. Currently, we are too far away from that point, and I don’t have all the information I need yet to make a call this early. We’ll stay adaptable in the mean time ...
The easterly trade winds will then take us up to the doldrums. The last part of this leg is going to be very tricky.
The monsoon season is changing off the coast of India so it’s tough to know if we will finish in an south west or a north east monsoon weather pattern by the time we get up to India.
I’m keeping an eye on it and following the trends closely. However the decisions on the strategy for that section of the leg is still 10 days away.
In the meantime we have some blistering fast sailing to do ...
Received 02:27 GMT