FINISHED!!!!

HEY! we crossed the line at 6:59 GMT ahead of British Soldier and Carina who were 5 miles behind us. We are currently in the port of Falmouth dropping off Yens (one of the Germans) who has to fly to LA to meet up with his new wife of 6 weeks. This was his honeymoon haha. We are then motoring on to Cowes and expect to be there some time tomorrow. Party tomorrow night, then to London Sunday morning.

Finish Please!

I´m ready to be done. We are stuck in the Irish Sea with no wind and 159.6 miles to go to Lizard pt. and then another 150 to Cowes, the later of which at least we can motor at 7 kts for...that´s still another 20 hrs or so though. We have less than 5 kts of wind right now and although it is quite nice out and beautiful and sunny and calm, I think we are all ready to be off this boat. Cameron and I have started playing a lot of gin rummy to pass the time, a lot. In the past 24 hours I also watched the entire HBO series The Pacific, and I´m halfway through a huge book that I really only halfway enjoy reading. I´ve listened to all the music I like at least 10 times and all the music I don´t like at least 5 times. I´ve even gotten tired of eating chocolate, but I´m powering through on that one.

Do I enjoy ocean racing yes. Was this a good experience, well it was an experience that´s for sure, and yea I suppose it was a good one. I am definitely glad that I am on a comfortable boat eating good food instead of cramped on a smaller boat running out of freeze dried food and granola bars right now. That being said, I think I´m going to stick to races that take less than a week. Anything longer than that should be done in a cruising fashion, where you have no commitment on the other end and can take your time and enjoy it. I´m also ready to be able to understand the conversations that are going on around me again, that´d be really nice. I´m looking forward to getting home and getting back in the rythymn of things, I´m excited to get back to coaching and being on a boat with a motor I´m allowed to turn on. Sleeping for more than 4 hours will be nice too.

Andrew, out.

Boredom

We saw a shark the other day, and I was asleep but a big whale came up right next to the boat and they have video of it which is pretty sweet. We´ve been seeing a ton of dolphins which is always pretty cool, but getting a little less exciting. I am really ready for some warm weather again, we are north now up towards England obviously and its freaking cold. I´m currently wearing 2 pairs of socks, long underwear, pants, my spraypants, a t-shirt,long sleeve, midweight zip fleece top, a heavier fleece, my big yellow jacket, a balclava and a hat and gloves, it sucks. We have been in and out of breeze for the past 2 days and today is looking like much of the same, we still have 558 miles to go and it seems like its going to take forever. I´m getting quite bored. I´ve pretty much exhausted myself of the games on Kyle´s Itouch, I´m reading a book about the settlement of the western United States, and have also started reading some of the Economist magazines Cameron brought. It´s getting pretty bad. Somehow I seem to be in decent physical shape just from doing physical labor every now and again even though I am treating my body like crap. Never getting more than 4-5 hours of sleep at a time and having chocolate and chips as a primary part of your diet can´t be good for you. There is so much food on the boat still, and I´ve gotten pretty tired of waiting around for people to cook so I´ve taken up the tactic of just grazing. The problem is I graze, then go read or something, get bored and start eating again. There is also just candy hidden everywhere on this boat. The salon has snickers, milkyways, three musketeers and starburst in it, in the fridge are big bars of Noir dark chocolate, on the kitchen table is a bag of little dark chocolate caps, and in my room is the private stash of chocolate that I brought just in case...temptation bests me everytime.

Summer Camp From Hell

This is the determination Cameron and I have made. The similarities between life on this boat and some obscure and obscene summer camp experience is uncanny. We don´t get nearly enough sleep and we are constantly woken up at odd hours of the night by strange sounds, etc. The food is edible, but you never really know if its going to be good from one day to the next. There is always a jug of some sort of colored juice available, for us the options are usually red or pink. There are different activities to do during the day, some people do leatherwork, others work on sewing projects, study the weather, drive the boat, etc. There is down time to read a book or relax. And the BIG reminder that you are at summer camp is the constant, constant barrage of camp songs that are sung out of tune extremely loudly at all times of the day. And of course I miss my mommy and my own bed.

Right now we are once again moving very slowly, I had the real crappy hour of driving for our watch this morning, Alex drove 1st and got a nice little squall so he was able to do 8-9 kts for a little while, then he turned it over to me right as the squall was passing so I got the fluky calm that came after in which all I could really do was keep the boat headed in the right direction while all the gauges read 0. As soon as I turned the wheel over to Santi the breeze came up and he had us moving along at 7-8 kts again. Cameron is on the wheel now and the breeze is back down a bit and we are only doing 4 kts. We did however just break into the last 700 miles to Lizard pt...so its like we basically just started a Newport to Bermuda race. I´ve come to the determination that at least after this race any other distance sailing I do will seem like a breeze because most other races only last a week max. And now that I have these sweet boots I need to justify keeping them so I have to keep doing some sort of ocean sailing, although I guess they´ll be good for shoveling snow in the winter too.

Current display:

Lizard
081 deg.
699.2 nm
200h 4m 44s

Ready Get Stuck

816 miles. This last 1000 is going to be, scratch that, is painful. We are stuck right in between 3 systems, I´m not quite sure how or why, as I try to keep out of the weather discussions as much as I can. All I do know is that we are fighting to stay in the breeze, and we aren´t necessarily winning. I just got off my shift behind the wheel during which I pinched us a bit too high trying to hold the breeze and accidentally tacked us...and then gybed I think. We got to see Hans in his underwear work his magic and get us back on course. The man really is a magician with this boat, he can make her do exactly what he wants perfectly to the point where it makes you feel like quite the bone head for not being able to do it yourself. Exactly 1 hour after my mishap I just watched almost the exact same thing happen to Santi while at the wheel. I am trying so hard to bite my tongue because I know for myself and for Santi we stayed within 10 degrees of the course and for the simple reason that we are stuck in a shifty hole that the wind sometimes just disappears and then comes back. It´s called a puff. The problem is it disappears, Hans wakes up from the rocking and the sails flogging, then the wind comes back by the time he is out of bed and on deck to lecture us about how the wind never changes and the instruments are bullshit bullshit bullshit and it is just always the helmsman who screws up. Blah Blah Blah sometimes the wind just shifts. It happens. I left us with a nice little S turn on our tracker, oh well, about a week ago Cameron spun us in a circle so now we´re even. On a completely different note, for those of you who watch South Park I had creme friache on my fruit cup for desert tonight...hahahaha creme friache.

Hoping we can squeeze through these highs and lows and make it England sooner rather than later...

-Andrew

Sugar Highs

Getting into the rythym of life has been interesting, and not altogether healthy...Basically you are either high or low, its tough to find a middle ground. You do work when you have to and you do your best not to complain about it too much even if it does mean losing precious sleep. You´re pretty much always tired, but you can´t always sleep. The shelf in the salon is stocked with candy which when you´re a bit groggy or very bored is impossible to say no to. Breakfast is pretty much on your own, the germans usually go for salami and cheese on some dark bread, which i´ve determined they will eat at any time of day in excessive amounts. I was heavily criticized the other day for having a bowl of fruit loops, apparently having sugary cereal in the morning isn´t common worldwide. Lunch varies between leftovers, sometimes a big salad or something of that nature, pizzas, or salami or other deli meats and cheese. There is a ton of salami on this boat. Dinners are generally a reasonably well balanced meal due to the incredible amount of vegetables that keep turning up on this boat, but everything else in between is chips and chocolate. Lots of chips and LOTS of chocolate. As I was saying at the beginning its all highs and lows, adrenaline and excitement during manuevers, tired boredom when you´re off watch. I think I´ve gotten the Argentines on my watch addicted to chocolate covered expresso beans from Trader Joes, they´re our primary method of making it through the night watches (thank you Hadley for suggesting to bring them). Anyway we broke 2 landmarks in short succession today, I drove us over the 2000 mile marker this afternoon, and then this evening we broke into our last 1000 miles to Lizard Point. Current distance remaining 961.6 nautical miles...LETS GOOOOOOOOO

-excited, tired, bored, tired, not looking forward to the inevitable wake up that will be coming between 5 and 8 am to set the spinnaker.

-Kind of wishing, but kind of pretty happy I´m not on Puma or Rambler who are doing between 20 and 30 knots through the fog with everything on their boat soaking wet. Speed would be nice, but I´m enjoying a warm dry bed and some hot food.

Cheers,

Andrew

Pasta Puntacena

Nothing like a cold redbull to wash down a delicious Italian meal before hopping on the dogwatch...ha.ha.ha. I cooked dinner tonight, which turned into Cameron and me cooking dinner (as I hoped it would). We made a delicious Spaghetti meal with a homemade sausage and prosciutto sauce and lots of mozzarella cheese. In my completely unbiased opinion I think the American team meals have been the best so far. Not to say that we haven´t had some other good feeds as well, but there have been some bad ones.

We are finally back in the breeze which has been great for the most part. We are averaging around 10 kts of boat speed which is awesome, and in just our last 3 watches we have done 128 miles! We have about 1200 miles as the crow flies left between us and Cowes which at this speed of about 200 miles a day would take 6 days. That´s IF we were to go in a straight line averaging 10 kts of boat speed. So realistically that´s not going to happen without quite a bit of good fortune.

Now as I said, being back in the breeze has been good for the most part. Yesterday I said to Cameron how it seems like we haven´t done much lately and that our watch seems to avoid the big sail changes. That evening Cameron blogged about how we play "the needle game" when we drive. Basically you have to keep the needle of the compass within a 20 degree window with a little bit of leeway on either side. He went so far as to explain how with waves and gusts you can get knocked about and some times you round up or down 30 degrees or so. Now he went even farther with his description and talked about how if you round up while flying a spinnaker at night in 15-20 kts of breeze you risk waking up the owner and the whole crew, tacking the boat under full sail and potentially doing some serious damage to the boat. He wrote this blog at about midnight, as we are sailing in 15-20 kts of breeze with the spinnaker up. at 1 am we turned over the helm to the next watch as the breeze picked up a little bit and we went below. 10 minutes later Cameron is settled in on the couch in the salon, I´m just about to get in bed and we feel the boat round up and hear the sails flapping heavily. We hold our breath for a minute, the sails stop luffing so we figure they saved it and came back down. Nope. EVERYBODY ON DECK NOW! They managed to do the impossible and tack with the spinnaker, mainsail (thankfully with 2 reefs already in), mizzen stay sail, and mizzen sail all up. We all threw on gear, and life jackets, and sprinted onto the deck. Somehow everyone went right to work, Cameron and I did what we knew how to do best and that was head right for the foredeck and try to get the spinnaker down. Alex and some of the Germans went to work easing the main around. We sail with a preventer on the boom at all times which is a line run from the end of the boom to a winch on the bow to ensure that it doesn´t come flying across the deck. so moving the main around is a bit of a process. Bear in mind that the boom weighs somewhere in the range of 500 lbs. Cameron and I were on the foredeck with Franco, one of the Argentines. The clew of the spinnaker had released and since we had tacked the spinnaker was inside the forestay. With I think only about 5 words spoken between Franco and me, I was able to explain to him how I wanted to get the spinnaker down without screwing anything up any more. It basically entailed the two of us wordlessly lowering the pole, this involves lowering the toping lift and taking up on the downhaul because you don´t do one without the other when the spinnaker pole is a good sized tree trunk. I then went up to the very bow where I was able to just grab the foot and the two of us, with Cameron on the halyard were able to get it down with only two small holes and no serious damage.

It´s times like this when I am really glad that I am not on "one of those plastic things" as our owner likes to refer to them. On any other boat having 4 sails backwinded in 25 kts of breeze would have likely brought the rig down. I didn´t realize it until Cameron mentioned it afterwards, but when we came on deck the boat was actually moving backwards, and at a pretty good clip too. Thankfully this didn´t happen in our first couple days out here because by this time everyone was able to fall into their natural positions with only a little bit of miscommunication. Everyone came out of it ok, other than being a little shaken up. After a few hours of sleep, I was dragged back out of bed at 5:30 to set the spinnaker again so we could get back up on the horse. "We are in a regatta you know" yes, thanks Hans. We know.

Other than that, and a slightly stressful douse this evening as the wind picked up everything is running smoothly and we are making good speed. We are expecting this breeze to hold through tomorrow at which point we are waiting for our mysterious weather guru to tell us where to go so we can be positioned well for the next big low pressure system coming through.

Few other side notes: We saw the sun for the 1st time in a few days today and I was able to do a little laundry in 5 gallon buckets on the back of the boat which was good. We saw a pod of about 10 porpoises/pilot whales the other day when we had no wind which was pretty freaking awesome. they came right up next to the boat. We also had only our 2nd spectacular sunset of the trip a few days ago which was also pretty cool. Finally we are hoping that it has been confirmed that we are not a terrorist threat because 2 days ago a plane circled around us a few times at what must have been an altitude of about 100 feet. It said "ICT Reconnaissance" on the side and we figured that they were out looking for ice chunks still floating south. turns out that ICT is the International Institute for Counter Terrorism...who knew.

Thats all for now, hoping to be in Cowes next week sometime.

Sailing fast and hoping for fair winds,

-Andrew

Halfway hopeful

I think we are around the halfway mark. I think. Thankfully the wind picked up late in the day yesterday and through the night, we are now flying along at 11 kts of boat speed, headed on a pretty direct course to Lizard point with a VMG around 9-10 kts! This breeze is supposed to hold for the next day or so before we get into a new system, but hopefully we will have reasonably steady winds from now on. Sitting in no wind yesterday sucked. Now that we have moved North it has gotten dramatically colder and everyone is basically just living in longjohns. Everyone except Tom, the British kid, who is still walking around barefoot in just a jacket and boardshorts. I don´t think he got the memo that the boat is no longer in the South Pacific. Cameron and I cooked up a mean feed of bacon cheeseburgers and coleslaw last night that went over very well with our foreign friends. Considering neither of us had ever made coleslaw, that we used proscuitto for bacon and mini bagels for buns I think it was a great success. On another note; Kyle I cannot explain how thankful I am that I have your Itouch. I have been wasting away countless hours playing Angry Birds, Tiny Wings, Fruit Ninja and Icopter and it has been awesome. We have a set of nice little speakers that we have been using to play music when we are on watch which has been great too. On a music note, the only time I think I could ever listen to German rock music would be at Oktoberfest, heavily intoxicated. Being on a boat listening to a bunch of men over the age of 45-50 chant along at the top of their lungs to terrible music in a coarse foreign language is on my list of least favorite things. They however greatly enjoy the country that Cameron and I listen to so we´ve been pushing to play as much of that as we can. hahahahaha. We´re being optimistic and hoping to be in England within a week of tomorrow! Well, here´s to hoping anyway.

ta ta for now!

-Andrew

Standing by to stand by

No Wind. lots of waves. no fun. So Since last night there has been absolutely no wind. We went North and sailed right into a nice big hole, had we stayed South we could have had a nice lane to the Azores which is where I´ve been trying to get people to agree to go anyway so it would have been a double win. But hindsight is 20-20. Anyway, we´re having a blast, the boat is just bobbing around back and forth, forth and back, forward and backward, left to starboard, port to right, all over the place in no particular order. Sleeping in your bed is pretty impossible because every time you start to fall asleep you wake up mid air getting tossed into the canvas that´s keeping you from getting tossed onto the floor. maneuvering the kitchen is also a challenge, Cameron managed to spill salt all over the floor and burn our skipper with hot water all in the 10 minutes between waking up and going on watch at 7 am. We only have our stay sail and mizzen sail up right now because everything else just flogs about. I´m looking at the gauges right now: Boat speed:0.0 Speed over ground: 0.5 VMG to waypoint: -1.2 This could take us a little while to get to England...We are on watch for another 2 and a half hours then the plan is to post up in the salon, watch some movies, play some cards, and eat chips and milkyway bars until the wind comes back. Then tonight, if we can manage, Cameron and I are making burgers, dogs and coleslaw in good American fashion. Happy 4th of July from a very bored boat!

1 Week

So today marks 1 week from when we started. My immediate reaction would be that it doesn´t feel like its been a week, but then when you think about it we have been here a while...and we still have quite a while to go. We surpassed the 1000 mile yesterday morning which means we still have over 2000 to go...here´s to hoping for some more wind and faster speeds. We are approaching the Flemish Cap for all you Perfect Storm buffs, and I gotta say this is one hell of a far distance to go on a fishing boat out of Gloucester. We are in pea soup fog and have been since yesterday afternoon. As far as I can tell we are on the edge of the world. The wind has been in and out, up to 20, and right now its basically nil. Makes for a wholeeeeeeee lot of fun. We are currently flying our asymmetric spinnaker off of the pole and we have the main down because on this deep of an angle in light air it does nothing but bounce around. On the back of the boat we have our mizzen main up with the womper (big oddly shaped mizzen spinnaker). Our watch schedule allowed for my first night as a real person in quite some time last night, we got off at 10pm, I had a nice steak and potato dinner, brushed my teeth and went to bed. Slept for 6 hours almost undisturbed (I made the power play and moved some stuff to the closet and slept on the top bunk :-) ) and then I woke up, had a nice bowl of cinnamon toast crunch with some blueberries and came on watch to get my morning workout of grinding winches and moving sails around. It is now almost 8 am and I am ready to go back to bed. Seeing as tommorrow is July 4th Cameron and I are planning on a traditional celebration and will be cooking up some burgers and hotdogs for dinner...Not sure if we´ll have a fireworks show, I´m pretty sure shooting off flares can send the wrong impression...

Thats all for now,

Cheers!

Andrew

Eat, Sleep, Sail

That is basically what life comes down to. Not always in that order, and not always evenly balanced but those are the only 3 things that matter out here and its quite nice. Very simple living. Yesterday was gorgeous out and today is looking to be the same. we are in a perfect wind vain between the North Atlantic high and a low pressure system to the north that is giving us 15-20 knots of breeze from the south/southwest and sunny skies with warm temperatures. Everyone dried out all their wet clothes yesterday after the squalls the night before, and our deck was quite a spectacle with spray gear and other clothes hanging everywhere possible. Our watch has a very ideal schedule for the next few days. Right now we are on a 5-9 schedule, so 5-9pm last night, then sleep all night and now we are up for our 5-9am shift. Everyday the watch that crosses 12 noon does a 5 hour shift so that the watches offset by an hour. So this means when we end our watch at 9 I have the entire day off and don´t go back on watch until 6 pm. Quite nice. I suppose its because we chose a southern route, and we will see if it pays off from a race perspective, but if nothing else its making for some amazing warm weather sailing. I was expecting to be taking a route similar to most of the 2nd fleet and be up off the coast of Nova Scotia getting as close to point Alpha (iceberg mark) as possible. I packed ready for winter, and instead have spent the last few days in nothing but shorts. No complaints here. Yesterday we had a consistent 10-15 ft swell coming off our starboard stern, and today the swell seems to have blown out a little bit making it a lot choppier. This makes for some tough driving because the boat gets tossed around quite a bit and you have to really focus and fight to keep her straight. When you get in the groove though, it is a thing of beauty. There really isn´t an easy way to describe surfing an 88 ft 70 ton boat...but its pretty freaking awesome. Riding up on the bow is quite amazing too, you really feel the power of the boat and the acceleration down the waves. Looking around this morning and seeing nothing but massive peaking waves and white caps in every direction is beautiful. Surprisingly we still see quite a few birds out here, not quite sure how, but they just always seem to be hanging out, playing in the wind and the waves. OH! and i almost forgot...WE SAW A PILOT WHALE YESTERDAY!!! It surfaced about 10-20 ft off our starboard side and came over to say hello. It was just a little guy but IT WAS SO COOL. That´s pretty much all the new news around here for now, we are flying 5 sails right now but I imagine once Hans(the owner) wakes up that he will want us to go back up with the spinnaker so we´ll see.

Cheers,

ANDREW

Welcome to the North Atlantic

I am writing this at 1:30am Friday June 30th. Today started out nice enough, we had the 3-7am watch and there was good breeze and although the seas were up a little bit it was fun sailing. Our watch tied the record so far averaging a speed of 9.5 kts over 4 hours. We had 5 sails up; from bow to stern we had the genoa, stay sail, main, mizzen stay sail and the mizzen main. Driving this boat is like playing a very old video game. By that I mean you spend your hour at the wheel staring at the compass trying to keep the needle within a 10 degree window, if you succeed your speed increases and you hope for a high score.

I have settled into the routine of living at sea which basically entails completely surrendering any sort of internal clock. I now have a much better appreciation for people who work both day and night shifts... As for me, I have to live by the cat nap. You get 4 hours of being off watch, but you usually aren´t in bed for the 1st half hour of that and then it takes some time to fall asleep so realistically you are looking at 3 hours of solid sleep at a time. Sometimes during the day you get lucky and the next guy lets you sleep a little longer, but sometimes, like tonight, people screw up and decide to cut their watch an hour short and kick you out of bed. not fun. So basically, you try to sleep as much as you can, whenever you can, wherever you can. When you are on standby you sleep on the sails in the salon, but you have to be ready to hop up on deck at a moments notice.

Now for the fun part. Today was the first day we really got to meet the North Atlantic, and she can be brutal when she wants to. For most of the day we were moving along on a beam to broad reach in about 15-20 kts of breeze and late in the afternoon our fearless owner decided that we should set a spinnaker. So 2 hours...yes 2 hours later we finally had all the gear set up after much input from almost everyone on the boat about how everything should be set up. On that note, if you aren´t going to be one of the people up working on the foredeck, then stay off my goddamn foredeck.

By the time we finally had the spinnaker rigged, a rain squall moved through so we waited a bit longer. After it passed, now around 6:30 pm, with an hour and a half left in our watch we finally got the kite up and the genoa down. We were flying along surfing down waves at about 12-13 kts, and were planning on carrying the spinnaker through the night. We saw another big black squall line coming down on us and reconsidered our decision and prepared to douse the spin. Just as we started to douse, the squall hit. 40 knots, impossibly heavy rain and high seas. We had the Genoa up, trying to drop the spinnaker, the spinnaker completely blew up so we had to drag its shreds out of the water, then we had to get the genoa down in 40 kts... then we were still rounding up and flying along so we went up with the stay sail and dropped the main all the way down. We secured the 3rd reef and went back up with the main. it took us roughly another hour and a half to get everything back sorted out and luckily the only damage to anyone or anything was the loss of our heavy air spinnaker. Yes, I was clipped in the entire time. Cameron, the Argentines, Tom (the Brit), and myself were exhausted from pulling down all the sails and getting tossed and sloshed around on bow securing everything. Unlike during the earlier part of the day when we were organizing and setting the spinnaker, surprisingly most the Germans decided to stay back and hangout in the back of the boat during all this. Once everything was secured, I went off watch and attempted to go to bed, only to get woken up almost an hour early...There have been squalls moving through all night so we are flying minimum sails and will likely wait until daybreak before we consider going up with anything larger. As the title implies, I think we finally met the North Atlantic today after 4 days of comfortable cruising. I go back on watch from 4 to 8am and am hoping that the weather has improved by then. Also, since the weather outside is so bad, all the hatches are closed up and down below is like a sauna. I am sweating my ass off typing this and am now going to try to go get a few more hours of sleep on top of a spinnaker hopefully before going up to get pelted with rain. I´M HAVING FUN. hahahahaha

Cheers,

Andrew

Culture Differences

So with a quad-cultural boat things can get pretty interesting...There is constant conversation that I cannot understand, and every time something really has to get done, everyone´s first reaction is to speak in their native language. Sometimes it just doesn´t work. The Argentines are the ones who know the boat the best, having done the delivery from NZed, and they are also the most adept at fixing things. This is great until you have someone at the top of the mast while under sail and you are trying to figure out what is going on and you have to relay a message through the person who speaks the best English. It is also apparent that due to peoples different sailing backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds, and different reasons for being on the boat that there are certain differences in expectations. Cameron and I came aboard ready for a race, expecting everyone to pull their fair share and with the full understanding that living conditions were not going to be ideal, and that sailing and the good of the crew took priority over certain personal comforts. This was apparently not the case for some of the owners friends. There have been no major issues, but is apparent that some people are not prepared to suffer slight discomfort. As an example, Cameron is sharing a 1 bunk room with 2 other people, 1 from each watch. I am in a 2 bunk room and when we suggested that he move into my cabin seeing as we don´t mind sleeping in the same room when we are off watch. It was shot down because if he is in the top bunk then "there would be no where for us to put our pillows and blankets" because that is definitely not what closets are for...Sorry I digress.

The sailing is going great, we are back in a good 10-15kt breeze and are making between 8 and 10 kts of boat speed. I drove for 2 hours last night from 2-4 in the morning and had us trucking along at 9-10 kts. The seas are still very flat which is nice and makes for very comfortable conditions. There is a lot of lazing about and I am getting into the thick of my book by now. The food has been "good". We definitely do not have a professional chef on board that much is for sure. Surprise surprise most of the fresh fruit and vegetables we brought are starting to go bad so we have been having lots of salad.

The boat as a whole is very sturdy and sails very well, however there is a reason that boat design has progressed since 1939...some of the things they did back then just didn´t work. Yesterday we spent about 45 minutes with Franco, one of the Argentines, up the mast because the block at the top of the mast sheared under the load of the genoa in 10 kts of breeze...this just shouldn´t happen. Cameron and I both have quite a few knocks on our heads in an attempt to find every low beam and short doorway on the boat. We figure the sooner we hit them all the better just so we know where they are.

We are expecting the breeze to hold, and hopefully build a little over the next 48 hours, as we chase our way down the vain between a high and low pressure system. We are attempting to stay with the breeze from the low while not going to far north. We have had dolphins swimming with us every day, but haven´t seen any whales yet, hopefully we see one soon, but hopefully it stays out of our way.

470 miles down and a heap more to go.


Cheers!

~~Andrew

Day 3

Day 3 brings rain and more wind as promised. It is blowing 15 kts and expected
to build. I am lucky right now and our watch has a 5 hr standby in order to
offset the watch times. Cameron and I are snoozing and reading in the salon
waiting to go on deck at 2 pm. Should be a wet one and we expect to do our 1st
genoa peel at around 20~25 kts of breeze which should be fun!

Cheers from Nordwind!

"Freakin Awesome"

"Dolphins in the night"

shining shimmering, dancing diving,
for they are the dolphins in the night,
they play in such sweet harmony,
following the rythym of the bow,
like ghosts they dance beneath the ship,
lights illuminating the trails of their tails,
they come and they go with such mystery,
for they are the dolphins in the night.

..Yes we saw dolphins last night. yes it was awesome.

So far the passage has been a mix of intense excitement and lots of down time.
The start was all adrenaline,especially considering that the first time we
tacked the boat as a crew was 17 minutes before the start. In order to tack
the genoa(big head sail) we have to raise our stay sail(inner head sail) so the
genoa can pass between the head stays...Needless to say it makes for quite a bit
of commotion on the bow, but Cameron and I handled it like champions and we had
an amazing start. I want to thank everyone who was out watching the start it
was really cool to have such a big crowd both on land at Castle Hill and out on
the water. We soon hit some thick fog that lasted just until dusk where it
cleared for sunset and let the stars come out. I am on watch for 4 hours at a
time, then sleeping for 4 hours then on standby for 4 hours which so far has
just meant moving from my bed to sleeping on the sails in the salon. Today was
a beautiful day with a variable 10 kt breeze and not a cloud in sky. We expect
this weather to hold for the next 18~24 hrs, at which time it should pick up to
~25 kts out of the south. Should be exciting. Everything on the boat is running
smoothly, although it can be a bit confusing at times due to the constant banter
of german, and spanish going on. My spanish is improving, my german...not so
much. I am still trying to get a feel for driving an 88 ft yawl but so far my
only practice has been from 3 to 4 am last night so I am hoping to work on it
some more tonight. The clear weather should make steering by the stars quite
easy tonight so we will see how it goes. Everyone is in great spirits and we
are looking forward to a bit more breeze. More to come soon, much love to
everyone back home! I am off to bed now to catch some zzzzzzs before my 1 a.m. to
5 a.m. watch.

Cheers!

And we're off!

2011 TransAtlantic

So this Sunday, June 26th, I will set sail aboard Nordwind, an 88 ft. yawl bound for Cowes, England as a part of the Trans Atlantic Race. I was lucky enough to catch a last minute ride on the boat thanks to a friend I race with on Elan, a Benetau 36.7. One of the crew broke a rib horseback riding last weekend and had to drop out for the race so in an effort to find a last minute replacement I got the call! Needless to say since I got the call at noon on Monday my life has been a whirlwind of preparation. I had already been teased with the thought of joining the race when I was offered a spot on the boat a few weeks ago but had it withdrawn when the owner decided to bring 5 people instead of 3.

I end my internship with Diprete Engineering this week and I will be putting off starting to coach at Weekapaug YC until I return. While they were not exactly happy that I would be missing the first week or 2 of the program, everyone down there is very excited for me and like all of you is waiting to hear my tales of the high seas.

I am only allowed to pack one bag and have to fit everything I need for 3 weeks of harsh cold weather sailing into it, along with a full set of dress clothes for our reception in England. When we arrive in England, hopefully in not much more than 2 weeks, I will be doing my best to hop on the first flight out so I can get back to my coaching job. I'm sure though that I'll have a little time to enjoy myself on land over there :-)

For the duration of the trip I will be sending short blog updates every day or two and I will post all of my pictures when I get back to the states.

Be sure to follow us on the race tracker via the link on the right!