Race 1 - Day 1
Crew Diary - Race 1, Day 1
02 September

Bettina Neid
Bettina Neid
Team Dare To Lead
Back to Reports View Team Page

Finally Racing

Hello World!

What an amazing start for a race! Sunshine and calm seas!

The starting line was just 500 metres long right in front of the Southend Pier. And yes! There were quite a number of spectators already there which of course was very well received by all of us. I personally didn’t expect to see so many at the pier at 1000 Monday morning. Thank you all!!!

Hmmm, 500 metres - that might sound quite a lot. However, it is in fact quite narrow when there are 11 boats, 70 foot long each, jostling for the best starting position. The pool was boiling with the circling of those sharks!

We were quite pleased to come second over the start line. Our tactic to show our Code 2 Spinnaker just about four minutes before start went pleasingly well.

Although the races are long and an awful lot of things might happen before one gets sight of the finish line, it is an important morale booster for the beginning of a race for each crew I guess.

Flying a Spinnaker takes up a lot of concentration and constant trimming is of utmost importance. Fortunately, all goes quite well for Dare to Lead (DTL) – fingers crossed. Other boats have not had as much luck and seeing a Spinnaker swimming in the sea is no fun. No matter whether it’s our own sail or not. As I am the lucky person in charge of sail repair on DTL I’m quite on my toes when one of the big babies flies. They are beautiful and vulnerable beasts ;-)

The whole crew is up on deck for the first day of the race and we will just start with our watch system in the evening. DTL will run a two watch system consisting of six and four hour watches. We named our watch teams the ‘swatch watch’ and the ‘rolex watch’ - hope nobody minds us using those terms. So the watches will be from 0000 – 4000 – 8000 – 1400 – 2000 – 0000.

Stuart already made the first loaf of bread on DTL and he got an amazing result – hmmmm, the smell and taste is overwhelming!

As a circumnavigator you might get to read a blog from me, from time to time in the coming months – I guess I’ll set up an aka name as ‘the sailing Austrian’

Servus!