The dreaded downhill battle has started
2009-05-21 by Roger Nilson
The last 24 hours have been very different from the days before. The dreaded downhill battle has started.
We got into harder running last night and had to accept that our boat speed was not matching the others. Ericsson 4 moved away from us fast on the radar screen and at 10,5 nm we lost her.
In the morning we found our selves on starboard gybe, with two boats in sight. "Telefónica blue" behind on our port quarter and Puma behind us on our starboard side. We had our A7 up, a furling fractional gennaker, as we could not handle the Telefónica Black boat with the large masthead gennaker in the building breeze. She was just nose diving too much.
Soon we realized that both the Telefónica Blue and Puma was considerable faster than us. We had to watch Puma passing us effortless, going more than a knot faster and a few degrees lower, under her biggest masthead gennaker in 27 knots of cold air. Telefónica Blue embraessed us the same way as Puma but it was more painful with Puma as she was so close when she passed us… Just a few hundred meters away.
Next to come from behind and pass us was Delta. She was a dot on the horizon to the South and a few hours later she disappeared straight in front of us! Very frustrating to say the least. Delta totally out sailed us with 1,5 knots more speed and going as much as 5 degrees lower...What to do?
The four of us Puma, Telefónica Blue, Telefónica Black and Delta chose the option to hang on to the SSW'ly breeze east of the front, on starboard gybe, rather than going North on port and crossing the front as soon as possible as Ericsson 4, Dragon and Ericsson 3 did. In our case we chose going East first as the prefrontal breeze was more left than predicted. 18.00 GMT the front had caught us up and the breeze swang around fast from SSW to West and we promptly gybed to port.
As it looks right now my feeling is that the Northern route will win.… In two days we will know.
Yours,
Roger Nilson
Navigator, Telefónica black