Crew Blog

Great sailing under spinnaker

28 June 2008

We’re now on UTC. After nearly 10 months away, and having travelled through almost very time zone, we are pretty much back where we started. We are still an hour behind our friends and family in the UK, but as soon as we reach Cork this evening – all things being equal – we’ll leap forward into British Summer Time.

At the moment dawn is breaking over the Atlantic as we wing our way ever closer to the Emerald Isle. The spinnaker is flying, and has managed to stay flying uneventfully all night: thankfully! Kite flying on Jamaica is never dull. The heavyweight had only been up for a few minutes yesterday when the strop broke and it came straight back down again. The lightweight kite had an overnight repair recently, and the less said about the medium weight the better.

But it has been great sailing under spinnaker over the last few days. Yesterday was my favourite: we had a beautiful sunny afternoon with cloudless blue skies, just the right amount of wind and some lovely big waves behind us. There are so few opportunities to helm a yacht this size whilst surfing downwind under kite, and it may be the last time we get to do it in this race. A strange feeling. The top speed of 16.8k was a bit of a novelty too, especially after spending a fair amount of time earlier on going nowhere at 0.0k.

The sight of another team off our starboard quarter has just interrupted the breakfast of poached egg, beans and cheesy potato cakes. They appear to be just a little way behind us, which is good news. But bad news swiftly follows it: apparently the heavyweight kite has 2 small tears in it. If we take it down now we’ll definitely lose out to Glasgow: Scotland with style Clipper, but if we leave it up it’ll probably go completely.

We’re taking it down…