can we help
+44(0)1983 296060
+1 757-788-8872
tell me moreJoin a rally

Menu

Monster project - Log Day 7 - The Story So Far!



Firstly, apologies for the lack of communication coming off of the boat. I promised daily updates at the start of the race. The plan was to move this to a "beginning, middle & end" feature but life onboard has been tiresome and tough. Everything you can imagine that could have happened has happened.

All the crew are exhausted and these boats are often described as "Man Eaters". It's doing just that. Easily burning through 3 helmsman in a 4 hour watch. The constant hassle of repacking the enormous kites inside a 70 foot boat. And the constant screaming and banging of the boat hammering along crashing through waves with the screech of the rudders every time the boat goes above 15 knots. But not all plain sailing with a few sail issues, debris issues and a minor keel issue. The boat is soaking wet inside and out, a constant routine of bailing out buckets of water is in place. Any form of dry clothing has now become a luxury!

So, Log 1:

We are Monster Project. A charter Volvo Open 70 that was originally built  for the 2008-09 Volvo Ocean Race by Team Russia. The boat is designed for full on Ocean racing made solely of Carbon Fibre and equipped with a 4.5m 6.5 ton canting keel. There are 17 of us onboard, 6 crew and 11 guests and our aim is to be the first boat to Rodney Bay, hopefully beating the existing record of 11 days and 5 hours in the process.

The Start:

The start was great, all of the racing fleet fighting their way into the start line in a building breeze, everyone wanting to be the first across. We squeezed in at the port end of the line, gybed and after a small snag popped out the A4 kite and headed offshore. We started to outrun the large cloud of building breeze that had approached Las Palmas just before the start and gybed back inshore to stay with it. Several gybes and several close crosses with Caro right up until the acceleration zone at the airport where we split. Caro stayed close inshore and we went offshore. Neither seemed to pay as Caro seemed to slow in a lack of breeze and we got caught between to cloud systems resulting in a lack of wind. A change to the Code 3 headsail.

Let me take this opportunity to fill you in with a bit of Information about Caro. She was launched at the beginning of summer this year and is a lightweight 65 foot carbon fibre monohull also with a canting keel (Quite possibly longer that ours). She has a completely new top of the range Doyle sails inventory and rumour has it that you can only be a part of the race crew if you've raced in the Volvo Ocean Race or the Americas Cup. This boat we raced against at the Rolex Middle Sea race and the Rolex Fastnet Race this year and so are a great target boat for us with their all pro race crew.

Approaching the evening and at the bottom of Gran Canaria we were engaged in  a drag race with Caro, if the breeze was above 10 knots we could hold our own but as soon as it dropped below Caro would catch up some more. We spent some time no more than 10 boat lengths from each other until the breeze completely shut off and we made a decision try a different approach and turn around and sail back on ourselves into more breeze and towards the south side of Las Palmas and start getting west.

The strategy from the beginning was to get North above the first low  pressure system and then hook into the second midway across the Atlantic. In the early hours of Day 2 we made the call to sail North of the last island of the Canaries. 


The Middle:

At sunrise on Day 2 the call was made to rehoist the Code 3 sail after a little bit of upwind to get around the island. However a bad furl and drop during the night resulted in a dodgy hoist. A few complications later and we were pulling the 353 square meter sail out of the water. The end result : a broken Code 3 with 2x 3 meter tears. A huge upset for the team so early on as this was our 'go to' kite. It was a furling sail so was easy to manage, made of Cuban and could be used at high wind angles to low wind angles and cover a huge wind range. This was also our sail of choice for the night sailing in case we came across any unwanted squalls.

The next several days has become a blur but from what I recall we had been pushing hard North / North west to get above a stalled low pressure system. 

We have enjoyed several hours of power reaching with the J2 or J4, the boats most powerful point of sail. Of our 11 guests onboard, 10 have never been offshore and a lot were feeling the effects of the "Motion of the Ocean" but everyone was seeing what the boat could do.

With the lack of a Code 3 sail we were into using our A sails and in a light patch of wind we were treated to a 90 degree wind shift that put us into our first ever 'Chinese Gybe'. An interesting situation with a canting keel boat as the boat then decides to rest hard over on its side. The crew recovered the boat quickly without damaging the kite. All whilst the skipper had been trapped in his bunk after 3 crates of food had slid in his direction!!

We also had an exciting situation on Thursday night with the A4 up, sailing  along and suddenly the rudder hit something. The boat speed was down. A few minutes later another bang. Something was caught somewhere and was affecting our performance. The decision was made to intentionally broach the boat.

Although we couldn't see anything on the rudders there was a chance  something was around the top of the keel fin. 3 attempts later and we hadn't cured the problem. 

Several minutes after recovering from the 3rd intentional broach and we were hit by a big squall with winds up to 35 knots. The A4 was dropped but the boat was still powering along almost uncontrollably with its full main. The characteristics of a fully battened mainsail like to round the boat up into the wind and in the sea way we had this happened. The boat stalled and ended up head to wind and moving backwards at 2 knots. This cured our Rudder/Keel entanglement but we now had another issue on our hands; Getting the boat out of Irons. In the heavy rain and strong winds it's hard to communicate to the person stood next to you let alone on the other side of the boat but some slick crew work again and we had the J4 out and the boat moving again. It had been an exhausting few days already but the events of the last couple of hours had really wrecked the majority of the crew, The plan to get through the night was to just sail under full main and J4.

Friday morning and the 0800 positions had shown we had lost some ground to Caro. We hoisted the A4 again to make up some ground from the night before.

No sooner had it been hoisted and set the wind build and shifted. The boat was now hammering directly down the waves at speeds exceeding 20 knots. The crew on deck reported that the boat was jumping from wave to wave. The sound inside was incredible. Loud bang after loud bang as the boat jumps along. And the one final loud bang. 

The loading of the gusts of wind and the impact's into the waves tore off  the Clew of the sail. A full team effort was required to recover the sail into the boat and another knock to the teams morale. This sail was the next best weapon after losing the Code 3 and now we had lost the A4 too. 

To make matters worse later in the day some wear to one of the hydraulic  hoses that supplies fluid to the port keel ram meant we we're leaking fluid and unable to build pressure. This meant we were unable to move the keel to windward, but the skipper was able to get to work and fix it and get the system up and running again!

Sandy (Nav) and Andy (Skipper) took some time to reconsider our options, amend the polars in our routing software to find the quickest most efficient way to get to Rodney Bay but keep in touch with or ahead of Caro. Before theantics of Thursday night we were looking at completing the course in just over 10 days. The new routing is showing just over 11 days so it's going to be tough to break the record. The bigger challenge is now to keep in touch with Caro and fight for line honours. Breaking the ARC Transatlantic record yourselves pointless if you're the 2nd boat to arrive!!

Friday lunchtime we hoisted the A6, our heavy weather fractional kite. The  boat is under powered most of the time with this sail as you wouldn't really put it up in winds sub 27 knots but it's the biggest strongest sail we have left. If we put up the A2 there's a chance we could destroy if quite quickly and we might need it towards the end of the race. Nonetheless we set the boats top speed of the race on Friday night / Saturday morning : 29.45 knots! The fastest for all but 5 people onboard. The boats personal best is around 32.1 and there's still time to break that.

And so that brings us to today. Day 7 and at 0800 we were approximately 42  miles behind Caro on the DTD rankings. It's clear that it's now a 2 boat race between ourselves and them and we're pushing hard. ETA is sometime in the morning on Wednesday.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep up the blogs but as you can guess life onboard is tough and opportunities are few and far between


Speak Soon
Tom Robinson - Monster Project


Previous | Next