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Aglaia - 26/11/2014



Two days into ARC 2014 and it has already proven the phrase the ocean is never the same twice.

We started from Las Palmas at 10.30 on Monday with a fast reach South to make the bottom of the island, all eyes were on the tracks of the fastest boats to see if they found a short cut through the potential wind shadows that can effect the area. We were recording 14 knots of boat speed as we screamed toward the area keeping fingers crossed for a quick route through and out into open ocean.

This is where it became tricky, there were yacht almost becalmed to both the north and south of us as we watched on the radar and worked to tread our way past. All was going perfectly until the last mile when we hit a big wind hole, the second bad news was this wind hole was where the seas funnelling between Gran Canaria and Tenerife come pouring out. Within 5 minutes of running out of wind all 77 feet of the yacht was being rolled around hard banging the sails from side to side, just as we were catching some breeze again one last hard roll flung the main sail across which caused the bottom batten attachment the mast track to come apart.

All hands quickly can into action to get a reef into the main to take the pressure off the rest of the sail whilst we looked at the damage and decided on the next approach, of course this all happened at sunset so daylight running out we decided to sail under just Genoa for the first night and try hard to keep up with the fully sailed Challenge yachts close by.

Morning dawned on a beautiful day and showed we had only dropped 5 miles over night even sailing with just a genoa. With all the parts we had on board a safe fix for the mainsail didn't present itself so we decided to go back to basics.

We are now sailing along with twin poled out genoas having the most comfortable run South West pretending to be a cruiser on a relaxed crossing. After the first day and well over 200 miles covered in 24 hours with wild life shows from two Whales, turtles and a couple of pods of dolphins relaxing in the sunshine with ice from the ice maker in my drink I think this whole cruising lark might have some merit!

So for today, everyone happy aboard well fed, relaxed and enjoying some sunshine and 10 knot sailing.

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