15 19.750n 29 09.052w
Race Report
Sun Nov 19 2023
There you go, blown our cover already! It’s meant to be a cruise but for a large part it was a race. And really this report is thanks to my good mate Dave Powys who sent a message just after we finished saying ‘bloody strong result for not racing!’ So here goes.
15 minutes to our start and the crew think it’s a good idea to remove some of the fenders hanging over the side. I say some because we managed the first 90 minutes with one dragging in the water. Clearly we didn’t want other rally goers to think we’d done any of this racing lark before and by and large I’d say we kept that charade up all the way to the finish.
10 minutes before the start and the call goes out to put the pole up. It’s a big old pole and weighs a ton and fortunately one end is permanently attached to the mast. Permanently isn’t entirely true as one day last year Frank and I were hauling it up the mast and it decided to let go of it’s fitting with the next stop being one of four places; 1. the deck - not good by any means but probably better than any of the next three. 2. The Coach roof window - utter disaster on every level. 3. My head - hideous thought. 4. Frank’s head - a marginally better place for it to land rather than mine.
But it turns out there was a fifth option. By the grace of The Great God of Chance, on its way down it snagged on another fitting, before gravity had fully got its teeth into it, and there it rested until we both got over the fact that we didn’t have a ten ton pole implanted in either of our skulls.
Anyway, back to the race. For some reason it caused 3 of the crew members some considerable confusion as regards how it should be hoisted and set. I put it down to pre-race nerves and the effect of 10 unbroken days of heavy drinking late into the night, every night. In fact when someone asked me if we sailed a ‘dry ship’ I said ‘we do now!’The boozers having wrung the neck on every bottle they could lay their hands on in the ships stores.
5 minutes before the start. During the pantomime that was happening on the foredeck, and just as the other boats were jilling for position as they lined up for the start, Emm somehow stacked it and fell on the deck only just avoiding going under the guardrail. Fortunately we were moving very slowly and had she gone in we’d have time to launch the dinghy and fish her out before she was more than a few centimetres from the boat. The only serious casualty at that point was Emm’s phone. Gone to the bottom of the sea.
Bang! Gun goes and……we’re still faffing around with poles and fenders and so on and still some several hundred metres from the line. Perhaps more importantly for a sailing race we still don’t have any sails up. Nonetheless with me at the helm watching this whole thing play out and doing little more than watch the rest of the fleet sail away from us, it wasn’t too long before all sails were hoisted.
Tactically, allowing the rest of the fleet to sail off several minutes earlier gave us a clear view of the track. And as they had decided to head off to the East and avoid the dreaded acceleration zone just South of the line meant there were very few boats in front of us. But what also seemed apparent was that any acceleration zone of 20+ knots over the existing wind state (currently only 8 knots) would not be a drama. So we headed straight for it prepared to gybe away should it become fiesty. It didn’t.
But what it did mean was that all the boats who shot off towards Africa were an hour or so before realising their detour was unnecessary. That left us in quite a nice position and quite high up in the fleet.
The next word of warnings issued by the race forecaster was about an enormous wind shadow south of the island. Allegedly, if you sailed into it you could be lost for days aimlessly drifting around and quite likely to run out of food and water before escaping its clutches.
That too also didn’t materialise but by the time we’d worked that out we’d committed ourselves to the East side of the rhum line. And as it turned out, there were significant differences in the short distances between the boats. The West side appeared to be getting the squalls, we appeared to be getting a slightly bigger sea.
Nonetheless, the wind was soon fresh and we saw a steady 20-25 knots for most of the way, with gusts above 30. We were heading dead down wind and most of the time reefed, sometimes at night a full deep, 3 reefs.
The boat rolled from beam end to beam end and doing anything was a bit of a mission. But there was no sea sickness and our wonderful ship simply lapped it up. Almost silent down below other than the sound of rushing water. The boat felt very capable and very robust. No one showed the slightest hint of anxiety and enjoyment levels remained high throughout.
But, as it turned out, not everyone found the 880 mile passage as easy as us. Our friends Malcolm and Claire (Wallace & Grommet) has a nightmare with one (of 2) forestays coming down. Absolutely terrifying. But in Malcolm’s laid back style he dealt with it with the same level of nonchalance as if someone had taken the last Battenberg out of his trolley whilst shuffling around Waitrose on Christmas Eve.
But we rolled over the line 18th out of 97 boats of all shapes and sizes including 4 Ultramar 55’s and several other multihulls. And on corrected time 4th in our class.
Given that we weren’t racing, a fair result.