Hello Qingers!
Where to start?!
Firstly, great news... we’re now in company with some Clipper Race yachts. Secondly, not so great news... We’re now in company with some Clipper Race yachts.
On the one hand, it's great to have some friends join us this far south, on the other, it's been very frustrating losing the little lead we had on them. Let me expand on why it’s frustrating.
F'ing fishing boats. I was sure we were done with them and now in open ocean.
During the day, on our electronic charts, we came across a fishing boat pulling in some buoys. The spacing between these buoys was a little over 2 miles and the three buoys still to come in were named no.13 & no.14. Two miles is a long way and I guessed any net would be deep between the buoys, so I decided to stay on course and go between them. To be safe, I go on the bow with binoculars to scan the water for any additional floats, with the crew ready for a very quick tack. Sure enough, about 3 boat lengths away there’s a row of smaller buoys with about 20 metre spacings. So, we throw a tack in and avoid the lot. A bit annoying but not much of a detour…
Fast forward about 10 hours. Early morning, pitch black, in thick fog. Phil sees a similar boat on the chart laying down buoys heading north, just laid down buoy no.4 – so there could be 20+ miles of nets behind him. We can’t go the shorter distance around his bow because we weren’t fast enough, so we had to tack south (the worse tack). We ended up having to sail over 30 miles around this ridiculously long fishing net. As we were getting to the last buoy, we see Perseverance flying at us going 12kts with the kite up. We let the team know the situation and they took their kite down and tacked south 7 miles.
Now we’re so close the race is on! We rounded the buoy and got our kite up, clinging onto a very small lead (only thanks to Perseverance having to send someone up the mast).
The good news is we’re finally in the wind we were hoping to find and, if we can stick with it, we should have a far more comfortable ride than the fleet further north.
Oh well, Long way to go!
The crew all really enjoyed our flyer and we’re happy with where we are.
Love to those at home,
Henry, Phil and the dragon riders