The stormy weather we had on the way down seems a distant memory,
sailing now under bright sunshine, blu skies and steady westerly winds
on a perfect reach to the finish. The angle is just to shy for the kite
and i could risk the assymetric kite but the wind goes down a few knots
for me to consider it then up again to think forget it. One of the
retirees of this race retired because of a nasty spinnaker wrap and
there couldnt be anything less entertaining to have to deal with now
than a sail gone crazy in the wind. Plus, with my electric autopilot
held together by tape i dont think it is a wise idea and the windvane is
too difficult to set on a straight line under kite, i would end up going
faster but on a drunken zig zag course (which is partly what i'm doing
at the moment but it's not soo bad under white sails only).
I have 105 miles left to go, so not exactly a tiny sprint, now the boat
is so well behaved sailing at around 6.5/7 knots that it seems a shame
to unsettle her for a little gain in speed. If you remember i have
already mentioned that my boat is not exactly the easiest to handle
downwind, when she speeds up she digs a hole for herself in the water
and hinges from bow to stern and rolls easily into the wind, so imagine
under windvane what that means, from lovely sailing to mad behaving.
One other aspect is that i am likely to get into Santander in the middle
of the night or very early at dawn. I am not familiar with the harbour
and i want to make sure i am not sailing in drawing on my last tiny bit
of energy left and do something stupid like go the wrong side of a buoy
and aground. It sounds like a remote possibility but although i'm
feeling very well it is always difficuly to judge how sharp you are
after 4 days, in my case i have no idea as it's the first time.
I could talk of sleep deprivation but I'll let you in on the fact that
last night, once the boat found the right pace i started an endless
cycle of half an hour naps till this morning at 7 (that's more than I
sleep in a normal day!) and after breakfast i thought, might as well,
and slept twice more half an hour. You see, with the previous night
spent dodging shipping i had built quite a sleep deficit and i dont want
to pay for it at the wrong moment, when approaching Santander.
I've been cautious and set to work all the technology this boat is
blessed with. I had the AIS on on alarm at an 8 miles radius for the big
fast ships and the radar on a 4 miles ring around me alarm set for a
periodic check every 5 minutes. That's very cautious. Anything coming
withing 4 miles of me would set the alarm off. Guess what, nothing al
night, not a blip, i had one boat on AIS some 15 miles away and that's
it. I must be clear of shipping routes and fishing grounds... but this
could change any minute and i could end up negotiating the finish with a
fleet of spanish fisherman who with the price of fuel sky rocketing
might be interested in a little claim to their insurance for damage to
their gear, by dumping a mile of nets just in front of me to get
entangled in. Now, this sounds like paranoia but many sailors will share
this view with me that sometimes they seem to be on a mission to drive
you crazy, whichever way you turn they're there to annoy you.
Ok, the wind seems to have droped further as i write, i'll go play with
the windvane and the sails to see if we can go any faster.
Just over hundreds miles to go, all wells so far, what was that joke,
it's not the fall the problem but the landing.
Ciao,
Marco
British Beagle
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