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Majic-L - Magical Challenge Day 5



After an early night, a 4am alarm was the order of the day for our planned 5am departure from Gosport. Naively I reached for the cereals but Linda (with great foresight as it happened) said to leave it and we'd eat later so just a cup of tea and we were off.
After motoring out of Gosport, we got the sails up as quickly as possible - which we know now meant we had to go a bit out of our way to keep the winds and if we had motored further at the beginning we could have traveled more directly, but then it wasn't a race!
The first 4-5 hours of the trip were a challenge to say the least - we kept up a pretty good speed under sail but boy was it choppy! We were all knitted out with lifelines as it would have been easy to fall out of the cockpit never mind having to go up on deck as Richard did to attend to the ropes on the mast.
As mentioned earlier in our blog, I'm the only member of the crew not an experienced sailor. Never was this more apparent when I offered to take turn at the helm - talk about things that look easy when they aren't. Dave handed over to me and said "try and keep it on 180 degrees - so there I was watching the compass and before I knew it I'd lost the wind and we were going around in a circle. I felt a bit daft and it gave everyone a good laugh, but Tony took some time to explain all the different variables I should have considered so I will do better next time.
Thankfully the sun eventually came out and a much more pleasant and comfortable sail was had for the rest of the time. We all look like we'd been on holiday as even if you were brown before, you were more suntanned now after 16 hours out on deck.
Looking at the tracker (great device - families have enjoyed seeing exactly where we were from home), we came into Cherbourg about half way though all the boats that made it. The buffet food and the beer that was laid on was very welcome after a long, challenging at times but enjoyable day and good to swap notes with other boats.
Sorry for those that had to turn back today, looking forward to a quick bit of shopping before time to head off to Guernsey tomorrow.




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