Leg 1 Race 1

Getting into the swing of things!

So race 1 started bright and early on the 2nd September. We had motored down the Thames the day before to the sound of cheers from all our supporters and then anchored overnight near Southend Pier. Sitting here at the end of the break wall at the entrance to Portimao harbour this seems such a long time ago now! It was such a high leaving London, by the time was made it to Southend (around 6 hours) everyone was tired and ready to settle down early! This leads us to anchor watch, where two at a time stay up for an hour to make sure we didn’t charge through our lines or drift into the Channel whilst everyone was sleeping! Usually it’s pretty uneventful but on this occasion the tide and the wind caused the boat to swing around and lie over the anchor warp (the rope on the chain) which got caught over the rudder. Part of the steering gear bent and snapped at 3am leaving us with no steering on one side of the boat!

Super Dan came to the rescue, a spare part was brought over from one of the other boats and Dan and Tom spent the night fixing the steering, just in time for sunrise!

Breakfast was at 6.30 and at 7 we lifted the anchor and set about hoisting sails and doing man overboard drills before reporting back to the start line for 9am. Seeing 11 huge shiny boats all sailing up and down the line was so impressive, each boat deciding the best part of the line to cross for the optimum getaway! We were starting in downwind direction, meaning we hoisted the spinnaker around the start signal going off! It all went well (the spinnaker is a tennis pitch sized triangular sail, only attached in 3 corners and generally has a mind of its own, randomly collapsing into the sea if you steer off the wind! The whole fleet stayed close together for the first 24 hours, playing cat and mouse with each other and it was all very exciting!

After leaving the Thames into the Channel the wind changed so that we were now “beating” into the wind. Beating into 25-30 knots makes life very difficult on board as the boat slams into the bottom of waves, jolting you in an unpredictable way, all while the boat is leaning (healed) over at around 45 degrees to vertical!

This caused a large number of crew to be seasick, some almost incapacitated by it (one so badly she has decided not to continue the journey and has left the boat here in Portugal!)

The living area was hot and cramped with bodies lying around in various states of fitness and the smell of vomit was ripe in the air! Being on deck was not much easier, but at least the wind was blowing away the smell!

In addition to this we had a couple of injuries (all ok now) and snapped the main halyard (the rope that holds up the main sail)!

Dan fashioned a new halyard from the topping lift and used a spinnaker halyard for topping lift and we were able to continue to race (at one point we were potentially going to have to sail back down towards land and drop anchor to re- run the line! However we were now 140 miles behind the fleet!

Finally we turned to be going across the wind, the boat levels out making life more manageable and slowly morale improved: helped by a pod of dolphins and some amazing food dishes such as the sesame chicken, bankers and mash, Thai green curry!

Just as it felt like we could catch them, we ripped the spinnaker meaning we had to take it down and continue under “white sails”. This is safer by a little slower. During prep week one of our team had received training in sail repair, so she set about patching up the rip down below (at around 2 in the morning). The repair took a couple of hours with a team of 4 helping her! Meanwhile the other spinnaker had to be rolled up, tied with wool and packed into its bag. That was a long night, I think many of us had only an hour of sleep that shift!

We continued making good ground and after rounding the bottom corner of Portugal we began to see another of the fleet (Seattle) on our AIS – the race is on! It is amazing how it become so much easier to focus on trimming the boat to go fast when there is another yacht in your sights! Sadly although we didn’t manage to catch them, we did get to within a couple of miles (from around 30) by the race finish. This gives us hope for the next race, although we finished last, several times we were able to work solve a problem, carry on sailing and make up ground again to start to catch the fleet.

This first race was a whirlwind introduction to ocean racing. I have now sailed in faster than 30knot winds, surfed down the biggest waves I’ve seen (so far), broached the boat, patched up sails in the dark, sailed by starlight and made wishes under shooting stars and seen some spectacular sunrises over the vast ocean.