Crew Blog

Charting progress

14 October 2007

I’m sure many of you will be looking at the race viewer and wondering how Durban 2010 and Beyond and Glasgow: Scotland with style Clipper are eating the miles more quickly than us. While we’ve been beating ourselves up over how to get more speed and a better direction out of the boat (more on that later), the main reason right now is a difference in tactics - Durban 2010 and Beyond and Glasgow: Scotland with style Clipper are pointing as far south as they can with this wind (a bearing of around 186 degrees) and accepting that it takes them very close to the coast, while we believe that getting that close will compromise the wind and slow us down. Stay tuned over the next couple of updates to see whether our strategy comes good and our tormentors get becalmed off the coast of Brazil. LATE UPDATE: Glasgow have now tacked out - how dramatic!

In a race like this you win on speed and direction, and you get those by having the right sails up, trimming them well and helming to the best of your ability. The first is being accomplished through the creation of an expert team - JC, Rick, Nick and Dave - hand-picked to be able to change the headsails as quickly as possible. These people are mostly part of the standard watches, but can be called on at any time of day to perform a change - most recently at 5am today when your correspondent was roused from his big mother watch sleep to get suited up and go and play on the foredeck.

The third point is being achieved through the establishment of a separate watch system for our five best helms (Dave, Nick, Robin, Lucy and Rob): an hour on mainsheet to get a feel for the boat, an hour helming, then three hours off so that they stay fresh. They don’t get any more sleep than people in the regular watches, but having a rota geared to them improves their performance. The trimming is handled through frequent sail checks and as much knowledge-sharing as possible so that everyone can make the call on what needs to happen.

Apologies for the lack of descriptions of our lunch or the fun of brushing one’s teeth on angle - normal service will probably resume tomorrow!

Chris ‘JC’ Wicks and Rick Smith

To illustrate today’s diary on tactics, here’s what we use to make decisions and see what other boats are up to. As you can see, we’ve been tacking out to ensure we have good wind away from the coast, while Durban 2010 and Beyond (the green circles marked with DURB) and Glasgow: Scotland with style Clipper (marked with GLAS) have mostly been staying in shore.