While the yeast situation continues, as does the zero count in freshly caught fish, our minds have been occupied with a little race within a race today. Notwithstanding the fact that the other yacht involved is a catamaran and therefore only distantly interesting for our own position, sailing within a maximum distance of 3 NM for over 36 hours brings to life racing spirits in the most laid back type of cruisers. 'Tucanon', a Lagoon 440, first appeared on our port quarters 2 nights ago and hasn't been out of our sight since. At first she appeared to slowly but surely sailing away from us, but then we decided we wouldn't want any of that, not on 'my watch'! Therefore we upped the efforts, pulled out the main next to our beloved Parasailor and put the pedal to the metal. This then proved to be just what we needed to crawl closer, inch by inch, to the people that we didn't know before, but after a number of daily radio contacts almost consider friends. Amazing how we are both in the middle of a gigantic body of water, separated by mere miles, never out of sight and both running west at speeds of well over 7 kts, racing each other!
Tonight around 0300 AM, just when we were about to cross the boundary of our first 1000 NM of this trip, the miracle happened, our hard work paid off, they ran out of luck, or whatever caused it; we finally overtook our new friends. Hopefully they will still be around when the light of day re-appears, so we can take some nice photographs of their Parasailor in full action. Something to remind them of Robinson and a beautiful ARC2009!
So, is all we did race a cat? No, we also enjoyed the sun, read our books, cleaned out the fridge and had a lovely lunch with Frankfurters followed by an even more lovely dinner with pasta al pesto with chicken and salad. And as icing on our cake we all had a lovely shower today. All in all a day in the ARC as they all should be, so bring on the next day!
Love to our loved ones, who always sail with us in our minds, and hopefully get a little taste of our experiences reading our log entries.
Robin, Annika & Bojan