Unconditional - ARC+ Day 2: Rocket Race & Blown Gennaker

Winds & seas picked up with a vengeance, and everyone was sailing. We were typically sailing our hull speed, but but we ‘surfed’ down some waves at 11.1-knots. Owing to having an Asymmetric vs a Symmetric Spinnaker, we couldn’t sail dead down wind, so we gave away a little distance made good in favor of speed.
At 5am, we fell off an 8’ wave/swell, lost air in the A-Symm and encountered a wrap around our Staysail. With tremendous unbalanced force, retrieving the gennaker in 25-knot winds resulted in a tear + 45-minutes of all crew teathered to the deck. Much care was taken to assure that lines did not wrap around any appendage, and that no one was in the path of a loaded line/sail.
Lesson: Don’t fly an A-symm at night in high seas and high winds. Of course, my wife told me that earlier...
In spite of sailing under mainsail for an hour in the wrong direction while we wrestled the A-symm, we sailed the fastest in our class and rose to #3 in our class, only 4-miles behind #1
Tom Hughes