Hello Qingers!!
Hello peeps. So, what’s been happening here. First off, it’s been a beautiful day here with good wind and sun. Felt a bit like summer! (well, I am from Northern Ireland).
So, after a few days of hammering to windward in quite large seas, the wind finally changed direction. See, we told you it would. After a while of sailing with white sails, we deployed our spinnaker and set off at a good rate of knots. The world and life was good again. Unfortunately, this didn’t last too long as the spinnaker just gave up the will to live and fell in the sea. We recovered it and got it back on board and again we were under white sails. Let's just say it needs a bit of TLC. Soon we deployed another spinnaker and got back up to full speed again and it has been spinnaker sailing ever since.
The crew has been fantastic at dealing with these unexpected occurrences and not letting it slow us too much, fixing breakages, recovering spinnakers, making sail changes and repeat. All in a day's work for the guys. We’ve had Henry to the top of the mast for a repair and to check the rig. Quite interesting given the sea state, more for Henry as I just sat and watched!
As usual, we were too close to the usual suspects, Perseverance and UNICEF. Over the past day,UNICEFmade a bit of a break north leaving Perseverance and us to fight it out amongst ourselves. We’ve now been sailing together like we’re tied at the waist, sailing the same speeds at the same angles and even gybing more or less at the same time. It’s nearly like we were privy to the same weather forecasts and have the same routing software! Oh, that’s right...
From home you will probably have noticed that we are now polling in first, but Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam being in stealth is the cause of that. And given how we have been swapping places with Perseverance and UNICEF (and with others hot on our heels), for the last while it will probably change, but we are counting on you to pray to your gods to keep us up.
Our next obstacle is the Ocean Sprint and tomorrow we will have a discussion as a team about what that may mean for us and how we will deal with it. It quite possibly will mean we will just keep doing exactly as we are doing, but with a new weather forecast due soon it may have an impact.
As I type, we have a teeny bit over 1,000 miles to the Finish Line, but that is still a long way with lots of weather and routing decisions to be made. And of course there’s bound to be a wind hole at some point.
Roll on Seattle.
Love to those at home,
Phil, Henry and the dragon riders