The latest race news from the race
Skipper's log: Alexia Barrier (France) & Joan Mulloy (Ireland), 4myplanet (IMOCA)
good morningfrom 4myplanet. its a lovely night tonight with clear skies
and stars and a warm wind, the grey drizzle and cold mist o the first
few days of the race seems like a long time ago now!
we have settled into our rythym on board nicely, usually one of us is
asleepand the other on deck sailing the boat.though we usually spend a
bit of tilme chatting during watch changeovers and are both generallyup
in the mornings and evenings. WE DONT HAVE A SCHEDULE, we just try to be
honest with each other about how we are feeling and,if we feel good tell
them to not set an alarm, that we aill wake them when we need to swop,
so far this has worked pretty well and i think we are reasonably well
rested!
we lost our wind instruments a few ays ago so have been sailing using
just the littlearrow at the topof the mast and our feelings as a guide.
while this is no doubt excellent practise, it is also a bit tiring as it
reauires constant attention. we took a bit of a chance earlier tonight
with an early gybe south, so we are looking forward to seeing how it
works out, early indicators are good but this, clearly,is a long game.
WE ARE TYRING TO ,soak, the boat downwind as much as possib le, that
is,make progress south west, with out going so low we loose speed.
we have almost used all the fresh food we brought with us - the rest is
just slowly expiring in our "fridge", which is actually just a box in
thecorner where fruit goes to die. for me, a northern european i cant
get used to the juxtapositin ofsailing in shorts and tshirt and my watch
tellingme its november! alexia as a born and bred south of france girl,
is not finding the adjustment veyr hard at all!
at themoment we are barrelin along with our biggest gennaker and a
staysail. earlier today we changedfrom our smaller gennaker (named Boris
after the man who very kindly lent it to us for this race); we spent a
bit oftime debating whether to hoist our spinnaker but decided not
too...and right now wr can rest assured wemade the right choice! our
spinnnaker is only for very light winds and even though i cant see
anything i would say we are currently in about 18-20 knots, with some
pretty big gusts around
the scale of this race takes some getting used to, when the posreport
comes in the boats on out screen are spread over a 1500nm sectino of
ocean; its easy to forget this, i often do, at a glance thinking, oh
great, we,re just about to sail past Pip, only to discoer on further
inspection that the gap im looking at is actually 120nm!
were getting some very good surfs in at the mometn, which is great fun
but some of which Alexia might think are a bit too much for the
Pingouin, so i,d better go up on deck and make it sound like everything
is under control,or Alexia will wake up and want to put a reef in....
APOLOGIES FOR TERRIBLE TYPOS AND PUNCUTAION, french keyboard, waves, fat
fingers, etc.
bisous!
joan and alexia