Pirates of the Caribbean - Leg Three Day 2
Well, we had a great start and that made us all feel good for about 30 minutes. Then the wind died where we were and it all started to get weird.
It was a long day on Port Philip Bay while we all waited for the sea
breeze to fill. It finally did and we were well positioned for that being most west. We got going first and had the lead at Mornington with ABN1 coming up fast. It did not take them long to pass us upwind in 22 knots of wind, both us of us on J4’s and full mains. Meanwhile, Movistar, Ericsson and Brasil were having a good battle just behind us.
When we got outside the entrance to the Bay, the wind was 24 knots and the sea was very rough. There were enough helicopters around to make four feature films so they must have gotten some good footage there.
Things progressed well from there with us and ABN 1 making some small
gains on the group. Then, around 000 local time, we caught ABN 1 and they set a course to pass behind and to leeward of us. They eventually came back out in front by ¼ of a mile. Not sure exactly what they were doing there.
Later on, we performed some bad changes from one spinnaker to another and lost quite a bit of distance. One of Ericsson, Brasil, or Movistar almost passed us. I am waiting for the position report right now to see what is going on and where everyone is. Our radar is pretty hopeless…can’t see another VOR 70 when it is 0.5 mile astern. Thank God the race committee is keeping us out of the ice this time.
The big picture for tonight is to get through Bass Strait, dodging several islands and to stay far enough away from Tasmania to not get too much of a wind shadow from it in the South West wind. The wind is about 20 knot from 225 right now. The big pressure that we were supposed to see from this front hasn’t materialized.
Still now position report so I guess I will fire this off to you all and you can see when I do where everyone is.
It never went.
Now it is 5 hours later. I haven’t slept yet on this race and now it is day time again. . Something went wrong on every maneuver we did last night so it was always necessary to have an extra guy on deck. Too many issues to list but nothing went smoothly and everything took a real long time. So we went pretty slow and lost some miles on the position report I was waiting for and I bet we lost more on the one coming up.
We have one problem that we have to resolve in order to be able to fly spinnakers. Right now we have a jib up.
That is it for now.
Paul Cayard
Pirates of the Caribbean
| This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 8:32 am and is filed under Main Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
