Here we all are at sunset the night before, all ready to be up-at-dawn for a tense start with all computers blazing! So many boats ready here gunwhale to gunwhale that you can walk right across the haven. We had a very good race, but hitting the rusting boiler of the Varvassi wreck at the Needles was a bit scary (and very loud below decks our navigator Carole assures me), although it puts us in a very exclusive club.
For those of you who don't race these things it is interesting to reflect on how little weight there is on board: a very little diesel, water, enough food, but jars through sleeping bags to cutlery are all gone. Our rig - mast, boom, sails even - is largely carbon - the "pitching" inertia at the mast tip is the square of the distance from the axis of pivot (ie the hull) so weight aloft with a big rig really does slow a boat. As my son at 10 once memorably said in a TV interview sailing has a lot of physics, meteorology, chess-like-tactics, engineering, computing and more. Plus it is flippin hard athletic work with scary bits too.
Nice though...
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Matthew Kiddle commented via Facebook: some of us even went as far as getting rid of the toilet, the down below, 20 foot off the length, and 7 of the crew!
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