Good day all,
Nice to be writing a blog again and back out sailing.
Thankyou Ha Long Bay, Vietnam for a fantastic stopover. It was a real cultural change to the previous stops in the race. Very welcoming people, great food, hundreds of amazing islands worth exploring, nice local temples and areas worth checking out, oh and some good golf courses! Due to a fast race in Race 7 the stopover gave us all enough time to rest well and also have a few days to enjoy some activities.
So back to racing... interesting start! We motored out of Ha Long Bay through the beautiful islands yesterday to the Le Mans start area. A Le Mans start means all boats, with a lead Skipper, line up out at sea and start with the same sails and course for ten minutes before changing and sailing the rest of the race as you choose. The reason being is the location of certain areas don't allow a normal Race Start line, sailing through hundreds of islands, commercial ships and fishing boats wouldn't be the safest option.
We unfortunately didn't have a very good start to the race, so fell back quickly trying to get our Code 2 spinnaker setup and a few other small issues, which was in hindsight the wrong sail. Charlie and I perhaps favour it too much on certain wind angles so during the night we decided to change eventually to the Code 1. We had it flying when we noticed the sheet had a knot in it which I ignored due to light winds. The wind picked up suddenly of course, and the working sheet snapped taking the non-working sheet completely out like a rocket, so we had no sheets left and a flogging Code 1. We retrieved the kite by attaching a spare sheet to the tack and a few drowsy crew had a pile of both spinnakers around them in the galley, wondering what was going on. After a lot of tidying up, packing and sorting we eventually had the Code 1 flying again and have been sailing nicely since but what a watch!
Extremely proud of the crew for how they handled a difficult situation and got to work with a good attitude straight away on the solutions.
We are currently all in a wind hole with a few boats doing a couple 360s so hoping the wind will fill in shortly and then it's a sprint to Zhuhai before the wind hole develops outside the Finish Line.
We look forward to the sailing ahead. We are a very motivated boat and in three days' time we could be finished, so its 120% until then!
Bye for now, Ryan, Charlie and the crew