This past 24 hours has been tough in several ways. Having worked hard throughout the night, I had to take my rest and awoke yesterday morning approximately three hours later. Unfortunately our good progress from first light had paid dividends but I hadn't been up to spot the layline to the gate.
At this point, we had a decision to make. Sacrifice the VMG angle [[EDITOR NOTE: velocity made good, or VMG, is a term used to indicate speed towards (or from) the direction of the wind.]] and lose miles to make the scoring gate or sail the race. Leave the scoring gate and the other yachts have a bigger incentive to push for it and they would have a chance to gain more points. That means we could win the race and not win the race overall. Or, we were to go for the scoring gate, and whilst we could lose positions we could ultimately regain these places.
It was all going well. We sacrificed what I would suggest was somewhere around 30-40nm to get back to the scoring gate and collected the first race points.
So with it all to play for, we hoisted our spinnaker once more. Unfortunately there was a lot of shipping traffic and one ship was unable to alter course quickly for us. Despite contacting the ship with our best efforts we had to take some pretty evasive avoiding action which ended in our spinnaker being damaged.
The atmosphere onboard is still good and we remain ever hopeful but unfortunately without that spinnaker, I fear that our race win has been denied this time.
We'll keep fighting and try to work something out. In the words of J-rod “we don't mess around”.