Hey! It’s been quite a hectic couple of nights, on board since our last blog.
The night immediately after, we had the nightmare that was our Yankee 3 braking free from its sheets, while going upwind in 30 knots you never really realise the power these sails have until one gets loose. It was only whipping round for maybe 20 seconds, but in that time, it had enough energy to whip into our stall and rip a 1.5-metre hole into it. Tacked, dropped the Yankee 3 to re-attach the sheet, then had to drop the staysail to try effective repairs. Although nobody was hurt, you always feel it in your hearts when you have to take sails down because you damaged them. This meant that as the wind was dying, we were missing one of our most important sails and had to downsize and use our storm jib as a staysail.
Later to add insult to injury, when preparing our Yankee to come out we found a smaller rip in that also! Likely getting caught on sharp hanks through tacks and gybes.
This meant that while everyone else was likely sailing at eight to ten knots with good angles, we were restricted to flying our two smallest headsails making less way upwind, as we were pushed sideways by our unbalanced sail plan.
This race has certainly thrown a few curveballs, but this has certainly been a low point. Not all is lost though, we were shocked to see in the position reports we got through, that we weren’t losing nearly as much ground as we were expecting, and thanks to our amazing sail repair time headed by Retief, with a huge help from Peter Lamond too, they’ve been working round the clock to get our staysail back in shape, and after only 23 hours we had her back up and flying! The patch hasn’t been named yet (as is tradition on DTL) but I think we're waiting till it's done its job to decide whether it gets a good name or a bad name.
Moods have lifted with our pace, and for an extra treat, we’ve even had some blue skies and sun this morning. Despite our bad luck, we’re still defiantly not down and out and we won't be giving up anytime soon.
That’s all for now,
Cheers,
Charlie, Ryan, and the doggedly persistent Dare To Lead crew