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Scarlet Oyster - Less than 1000 to go!! Scarlet Day 10 Blog



Hi All!

As of this morning we are now through the 1000dtg mark, this is good news as
our distance to waypoint on our helm display cannot go beyond 999,
unfortunately this display has succumbed to either heat exhaustion, or it
perhaps drowned in one of yesterdays squalls!

Our worthy adversaries on Captain Blind are sailing slightly quicker than we
can manage, and choosing similar angles, occasionally they will lift off
more to the S, but on balance we are trying to do the same thing ie sail as
low as we can with speed in these lighter winds. From their blogs it
appears they are getting wound up by our apparent following tactics!

We are sailing to our angles, as to do otherwise would give them an
advantage, it seems that both boats like the same angles! Hopefully after
rum in st Lucia they will cool down bit and we will all be friends!
Increasingly it is becoming a 2 horse race in our class, as the lighter
winds arrive it is important that we stay near them to reduce the chance
they can make a break into more advantageous conditions than us, they are
creeping away, an we are doing all we can to close St lucia as fast as we
can!

Leopard has set the bar for the overall race course record and also a
corrected time we would love to beat to be in contention overall racing.
The current average speed we have made all race would see us ahead of this
time, however forecast light winds before the finish for us could make this
hard to achieve... Will be interesting to see how it plays out, at least we
may all get to go for a swim if we do parkup...

We may have pushed too hard yesterday in pursuit of our allegedly partially
sighted rivals! We broke our trusty running kite... The damage appears to
be too extensive to fix onboard, so we are now limited to 4 spinnakers, the
big a2 is looking to be the weapon of choice, but this sail is nursing a
rather poorly looking tack, which we tore of it 4 days ago, the latest
repair which involves a lot of sticky kevlar strips and a great deal of
sewing seems to be holding.

Our A3 reaching spinnaker has had a better than usual ARC, I think we have
blown its head off on every other ARC, this time it has survived 35knots
squalls in pitch darkness, perhaps it has grown conditioned to this sort of
abuse?!

Anyway enough ramblings already, need to look at new weather files which I
can download from right about now, so we can work out how best to hunt down
the French!

By for now

Ross


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