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Having just re read a lot of the blogs that I posted during the race, it does seem that all I did was day dream about food, read books, break things and play spider solitaire. I would like to point out that, while these were achieved, the majority of my time was actually spent sailing, trimming, analysing weather and making rash, risky tactical decisions. Obviously, for entertainment reasons, the extra curricular activities were happily overemphasised!
Wow. Wow. Wow. Its finished! How surreal!
It typical Katie style I finished in the middle of the night. The last few miles were a real test as the fluky wind backed and veered, dropped and increased. We fetched the majority of the final leg in toward the coast. Just as the light was dropping I caught sight of Nomans Land, just the the southern tip of Marthas Vineyard. After that it was time to concentrate on figuring out the lights for the approach to the finish line.
It seems like it will always be three days to the finish of this race. Yesterday it was three days, today it was three days, and the law of probability suggests tomorrow it might be three days. But still, things on board bluQube remain very interesting. Today has been weather day! So far we’ve had no wind, about 20 knots of wind, we’ve had incredibly thick fog, we’ve had rain of various intensities and the piece de resistance was an almighty thunder storm with fork lightening exploding into the water around us. Pretty intense stuff!
First of all congratulations to Jan who won the race this morning! Have to say we are looking forward to crossing the finish line here on bluQube.
On board bluQube today we have a bit of a dilemma in that the trusty computer keyboard has died. Unfortunately this means I am forced to talk to people and communicate a blog over the phone, so much for disappearing off the face of the earth for some quiet time.
Anyone that knows me already could have confirmed it, but I feel I need to let you all know... I'm definitely not a Monica. While bluQube started off as a tidy and organised ship, with different boxes for different items (categorised) and a different bag for a different week of clothes, food lovingly separated into daily rations, ordered so that there was NO repetition from day 4 to day 5, after sixteen days at sea, the order and organisation has been lost. If Monica Gellar were on board now, she would have a fit.
Well it's day 15! Finally.
It suddenly got very cold over night as the wind swung to the north. A quick check of the sea temperature confirmed all - down to 7 degrees c. Pretty Chilly. As I was trying to reassemble the foresail into the head foil, my hands were freezing! Not the weather for drying out sleeping bags and oilies then... shame! Could have done with that!
So the gale/storm was worse than anticipated. Mucho infact. I really wish I had wind instruments so that I can tell you exactly how windy it was. I could swear it was more than 35kn true, but then again with the apparent on top (40 maybe) I guess that would seem about right. The seas were something else. The Atlantic swell has always been described to me as having a much longer wavelength than on the continental shelf, but I haven't really noticed much. Maybe I was imagining a much more pronounced change.
Captains Log, Atlantic 060609 1355 UTC
Lots of wind last night and now none again. Nothing worse than honking up the mainsail and changing the jib knowing that it has all got to come back down again in a matter of hours.
The gale coming through will be the biggest yet and pretty pivotal for bluQube and me. Hoping that we are better placed to make some advantageous changes on the leader board, but we will have to wait and play it by the conditions. Can't really worry about anyone else at the moment.
