A game of chess with Cessna

In a few miles we’ll touch the latitude of 60 degrees south, it sounds
quite frightening but my cure is to remember that when I sailed the
Shetland Round Britain and Ireland in 2010 we were in higher latitudes in
the northern hemisphere, I guess what makes here so overwhelming is the
sense of isolation but if you say to yourself i’m sailing around the
Shetlands it does not sound quite as horrible! We are 1000 miles from Cape
Horn and as soon as the wind will turn it should soon become a fast ride
to our next stop.

The battle with Cessna continues on the high seas, yesterday our opponents
decided to break the cover and tacked north-east for about 8 hours. We
welcomed their move as we know that as long as we are in the same winds we
cannot beat a latest generation boat. It’s like a very slow game of chess
where each move takes days to show it’s merits or prove to be an error.
For those who don’t know, Conrad Colman’s boat is an Akilaria RC2, we sail
the previous version, the Akilaria RC1 from the same designer (Marc
Lombard) and the same yard (MC-Tec). Both would have a lot of explaining
to do to their customers if the newer design wasn’t faster. We have had a
bit of luck with the weather helping us catch them when they got away
after the first 10 days of racing, now, upwind we can still play cat and
mouse but soon when the wind will shift and we’ll be reaching we will
struggle to keep the same speeds. For now, we’re doing our best to get in
the lead and we can always take it from there.

We have to report a broken sheave on the boom end sheave box, this caused
one of the reefing pennants to damage the carbon sheave separators, not a
big deal but will make reefing a slightly lengthier manoeuvre. We also
mysteriously broke one of the mainsail cars, not an issue in light winds
but we have to hope this will not prove to be a problem in the heavy
downwind conditions we expect later at the horn…

Day by day the job list inevitably builds up with a little new issue that
will need to be addressed in Punta before the restart of the next leg, the
main one being the torn A2 Spinnaker, but also some other maintenance jobs
on the staysail and mainsail such as the broken car probably result of the
week long dreadful upwind work earlier in the leg… So once again I wish
to thank those who are helping me to continue racing with your paypal
donations at www.marconannini.com/help

Lap of luxury........

Posted by: firstclass