A night of drama and a hard fought podium result into Cape Town<\/p>\n
This is just a brief message to say that we’ve crossed the finish line to
\ntake third in the first leg of the Global Ocean Race managing to keep
\nCessna behind to the finish. Paul and I are absolutely exhausted but
\nincredibly delighted. We have given absolutely all we had to give to
\nachieve this result…<\/p>\n
It was not as straight forward as it first may seem, however close the
\nbattle was on the tracker drama unfolded thickening the plot in the
\ndarkest hours of the night.<\/p>\n
Just after the 9pm position report we had gained just enough miles to
\nstart believing it was going to be possible, we had 22 miles lead with 150
\nto go and at that stage we were better positioned relative to the finish
\nline and polling higher speeds.<\/p>\n
Then a sequence of events that can only have been conceived by a Hollywood story writer
\nwe had some of the most difficult moments of the race… surfing at 15-17 knots
\nthe tack line of the big spinnaker broke, the kite was left flying and wrapping and it took
\nus a good half an hour before we had it down… we tried to fly it again,
\nfrom the bow rather than from the bowsprit but the sock was twisted and we
\ncouldn’t get it to open… so we changed for the A6, the smaller spinnaker,
\nin the hope that thanks to the surfing waves we could have managed just enough
\nspeed and still win with our 22 miles lead…<\/p>\n
Flying the spinnaker from the bow was difficult as it kept collapsing and filling
\nwith loud bangs, after one of these the runner broke at the same time as
\nthe spinnaker exploding… we don’t know exactly what happened, the
\nspinnaker must have wrapped around the pulpit before filling as the pulpit
\nhas literally been torn out… lots of damage hence, a torn spinnaker, a
\nbroken runner and the pulpit… at this stage we thought there was little
\nwe could do, but we decided we’d check the position report, take stock and
\nsee what if any of the other sails we could fly.<\/p>\n
Here fate intervened, oneof the emails that came through when we checked
\npositions was from Cessna, they had also suffered damaged and were limping
\ninto Cape Town without spinnakers… the two incidents happened pretty much
\nsimultaneously leaving us with a somewhat bizarre race to the finish with just our
\nmainsails and genoas… we had 28 miles lead by this stage, we kept going
\nand even just under mainsail and genoa kept averaging around 10 knots
\nthanks to the enormous swell that was getting us surfing regularly…<\/p>\n
We arrived to the finish line about 3 hours ahead of Cessna. Their white
\nknuckle strategy backfired, and simultaneously left us with expensive
\ndamage that will run into the thousands of pounds to take care of but it
\nwas a spectacular and hard fought race to the very finish and we are
\nlooking forward to celebrate in Cape Town.<\/p>\n
More stories and photos of the finish to follow. A night of drama and a hard fought podium result into Cape Town This is just a brief message to say that we’ve crossed the finish line to take third in the first leg of the Global Ocean Race managing to keep Cessna behind to the finish. Paul and I are absolutely exhausted but incredibly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-ocean-race"],"views":1933,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":407,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstclasssailing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIf you’d like to celebrate with us and buy us a beer you can do so online
\nat www.marconannini.com\/help<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"