Nisida - Nisida - Log #5 - friday Nov 27
Nisida - Day #5 - Nov 27-28
Days on the ARC are from noon to noon, punctuated by the position given at noon everyday. We continued on our 225 miles on day 4 by logging 122 miles from noon to midnight. But the winds decreased and our overall run today was 205 miles.
This has been a day of practice. Thursday afternoon we took down the
spinnaker to check the halyard, set the genoa, reset the spinnaker, took down the genoa. Around midnight we took advantage of a favourable wind shift to gybe (not kidding!). At dawn, as the wind lightened, we replaced the heavy spinnaker with the light one. There must be a few more gybes and poling of the spinnaker or removing of the pole. It's all a blur for the crew. What we are sure of is that these tactical decisions allowed us to take advantage of the conditions. The conditions, well, are not ideal. The excitement of the previous day has given way to the sober pondering of the various areas of light winds still persisting over the tropical Atlantic. Without betraying trade secrets, we have plans to exploit the situation.
Oh, and where are we? Essentially, we have done our right turn north of the Cabo Verde islands. We are now sailing more or less in the general direction of St. Lucia, give or take a few gybes!
As we have made enough headway now, time on board has been changed to GMT-1, i.e., EST + 4. We set the boat clock back 1 hour about every time zone, that is, about 15 degrees of longitude.
Top ten things not to do on an ARC racing yacht:
9: Do not hand over the helm midway down a big roller ... without making
sure the next driver holds it.
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