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Scarlet Oyster - Tough milk run! Day 7 on Scarlet



Hi all, excuse lack of blog, been a bit busy last few days!

We have got our A3 spinnaker back in one piece (well we had fixed this a few days ago), bit pointless as this is apparently a non spinnaker upwind event this year! Repair looks good, 3rd time this poor sail has been beheaded!

Could be a good luck omen as the last 2 times were the 2007 fastnet (where we won class 1 on line and hcap) and the ARC 2011, where we also did rather well!


Certainly this year is a different race to 2011! I have already seen more than 2 years worth of rain on this trip, where as in 2011 we had only one light shower the whole crossing! 90% of the 2011 crossing we were being propelled by out trusty big red runner, this time, while we have breifly used all 4 kites, we have been under white sails for 75% so far. Perhaps buying a rather large spinnaker of a 60' race yacht was not a good call for this event!


2 days ago we were swimming in calm seas racing the boat, amazing how fast 2.5knots actually is! Since then while better progress has been made it has been a little more taxing on the crew. I was very surprised that despite almost no wind and rather small sails, we kept sliding along in the light winds of Thursday, even when the sails were flapping back and forth we seemed to pump forwards at over a knot, not the quietest of progress. It was with some amusement and envy we watched the cruisers motoring past with just their main sails up, it was a great opportunity for some house keeping, the watermaker certainly seemed to be much happier than normal, and we now have a working forward shower pump out!


Our relative N position compared to some seemed to hurt us a little as the wind reached us last on Thursday, we do however look well set up for the next phase. Thursday nights speed was looking great till 0500 when after having the wind increase to 25knots from a good SSE angle, the massive cloud generating the extra kick swallowed us up! We had rain of biblical proportions for the next 2-3hrs with the wind switching all points of the compass, Xarah a cruising boat will have a similar story, she had the luxury of the use of her engine and powered out of the mess it seemed, while we had to gybe 8 times and tack at least a dozen to get free! Never been stuck like that for so long, very frustrating, with a 1 hr run of about 1 mile in the middle of it!


Northern Child has been performing extremely well we have been locked in a sort of drag race for the last 30hrs, the rest of our fleet are mostly to the S, we negotiated what looked like a tropical wave only moving the wrong way last night, managed to stay safely N of it, NC came this side too, as did Parma, others are S of this, hopefully no one got too near it as I imagine it would have made our cloud from Friday morning look like a fun day out!


The guys are getting pretty slick at reefing and unreefing the main, we had 2 slabs in for half the night with winds approaching 30knots not had much sleep to if I am rambling on a bit please excuse! Anyway we have Monday penciled in the diary to put a spinnaker back up, what ever one of those looks like, I am struggling to remember! Looks very upwind till then, pleased that old Scarlet seems to be managing well with the conditions so far, long may that continue.


Going to get my head down for a few zzz's hopefully

Cheers

Ross



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