Race 2 - Day 1
Skipper Report
16 September

Race Start day; excitement, apprehension, tension and all the rest.

For us, it was a normal Race Start day. We were happy, we had prepared her (GoToBermuda) well and were looking forward to a good start. We went nicely over the line at around the three mile course and settled into a nice beat out.

Suddenly, bang, the main halyard snapped. The whole main came down in under two seconds, or so it felt, but we had set our topping lift correctly and the boom stayed put. Hence I am happy to say the crew were not injured in any way.

So now we needed to think quick. Our topping lift became a temporary main halyard and our port spinnaker halyard became a temporary topping lift, and back up went the main. Great work for a very temporary measure, but by no means a long term solution.

We pulled out the old main halyard, which we had kept just in case, cleared the broken one and prepared a mousing line with some nuts to weigh it down. Then we bore away to keep the rig as safe and upright as possible and very carefully hoisted Chief, Fabian, to the top. After 72 minutes of hard work, he successfully got a mousing line down to us and we got him down, uninjured.

Our next little hurdle, somehow the line managed to hook, both at the top and inside the mast, and after half an hour of working it out, we untwisted the inside of the mast (having dropped a few nuts into the mast, sorry riggers). However to get the top unhooked we sent Callum Brown, to the top. Up again, and then success, down came the "old new main halyard". Down came Callum safely and with a little prep we were ready to go from a temporary measure to a permanent fix. We dropped the main again, this time under control, moved the topping lift and spin halyard back added our "new old main halyard" and re-hoisted. Powered up and rejoined the race, just as the sun was passing over the horizon.

So I feel confident that we have made an excellent fix, which will get us to Punta del Este if not the world. What we have done is kept the "old new main halyard" so it can be checked as to why it snapped. Maybe we were just unlucky, but I have never seen a main halyard snap in the mast before especially in such light conditions.

But what I can say is I was really very proud of the crew, their excellent safety and the way they got on with the repair and kept each other safe.

And all we lost was about 20 nm...

So here we go catch up, watch out guys here we come.

Chat later

Wavy