Day One -- Northern Child
...and finally we are
underway to St. Lucia. The race got delayed by one day because of strong
winds and heavy seas. The entire crew felt a great sense of disappointment,
but trusted the ARC organizers knew what they were doing. Indeed, having a
lot of sick people on board the first day would not have been great fun. Some of
us took the extra day as another day of rest; others took it as an opportunity
to see the old town of Las Palmas and visit the museum dedicated to the man
whose "footsteps" were are about to follow; yet others were able to spend
another day with their loved ones who had come to Las Palmas to see them
off. A final crew dinner at the Club Sottovento, just as the crew of
mega-yacht Leopard III left to go to sleep early and get ready for what
undoubtedly will be their six-day crossing, got
our morale back to where it was a meant to be for today's start.
The departure from the docks this morning was
smooth but emotionally charged, with some of us even hiding a tear or two. The
30-some boats in the racing division all greeted each other, wishing one
another a safe crossing. With northerly winds of 25 kts and good swells of
up to 3 meters, we crossed the start line with impressive speeds
of around 10 kts. The first few hours were spent to get around the
island of Gran Canaria, crossing the acceleration zone. This meant some
spectacular broad reach sailing with nice rolls amidst the swells from the
prior day's storm. And, most importantly, none of our crew showed any
signs of sea sickness.
Some us frantically managed
to take pictures and update our Facebook profiles, send
Whatsapps, text and other messages to friends and
family just before they were about to lose their
mobile signal and go cold turkey on living without social media for the
following few weeks. The Yellow Brick application showed us that we are
positioned 10th in the racing division just before we hit the wind shadow south
of Gran Canaria. Not bad for a first day, but leaving enough room to improve our
ranking. Interestingly, Yellow Brick seems to believe that we all did leave on
Sunday and calculates our expected time of arrival to be January
3rd. Undoubtedly this will be corrected at
some point. Our watch system will start at 6 PM, and until then we are
being entertained by Chris' fantastic play list which is blasting over the
ocean as we update this daily blog.