CoCo / ARC – Day 11

05/12/14 12:00 UTC

DIST SAILED: 1770 nm

DIST TOGO: 735 nm

PRESENT SET: GENOA REACHING

“The passage had begun; and the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet” – Joseph Conrad

What an afternoon and evening on the water we had yesterday. Fantastic weather and easy going with only genoa reaching. Perhaps not the greatest wind and pace, but it gives us time to reflect on what we are experiencing.

Our passage so far has been challenging, exciting and rewarding from a nautical point of view, but more important is the experience of being in such a micro environment for so many days. Our minds are definitely getting narrower, focused on the well-being of each other, and the daily tasks in our small floating habitat. We have in other words given up on the global challenges for now, which really adds to the relief and wash out that such an ocean voyage can provide. We promise to return to our daily duties and responsibilities in due course, but for now, we enjoy being in our small and remote tribe.

Yesterday for dinner we engaged the autopilot and set a table for 6 in the aft cockpit. We have a full moon these days, the boat moved gently, and Sebastian made an incredible dinner of steaks, vegetables and a totally custom red wine sauce; solid, natural and hand made from the bottom up. Absolutely delicious! We made several toasts for our great fortune of being able to do this together. CoCo always was, and remains, a happy ship!

Yesterday was also the setting for contemplation and de-brief of an incident which I have yet to tell you about. As many of you know, we destroyed our genakker in the early days of the passage, and since then we have been watching over our spinnaker as a new born baby. At least, this was the case until a few days ago, when we started to gain and saw the opportunity to do real well in the race. We then made a decision to increase risk, extend ‘race mode’, and let the spinnaker fly at night. The overall conditions have become light so the only risk of any trouble would be squalls.

Well, that’s exactly what hit us the night between the 3rd and the 4th of December. Coming out of nowhere, winds gusting to 30 knots, rain hovering down, and before you know it it’s too late to take the sail down, you just have to follow the wind and pray that it will go over before the sail blows out. Brian did a fantastic job keeping the boat straight in longitudinal line with the immense forces in the spinnaker, and everyone else were just hands-off, staying safe and watching. Unfortunately, nature won, and the spinnaker came down in pieces. We managed, with some effort and collective calmness, to get everything back on-board. No other harm done to people or equipment, which was the main topic of talks and celebrations through yesterday.

From a regatta point of view, being in a downwind race and approaching the final sprint to finish, the lack of proper clothing can be quite determining for our result. After so much hard work this is of course a source of disappointment, so we needed a bit of time to cope with this before going public.

Now, any situations can also give opportunities, which is what we are now exploring. It’s obvious that staying in the same line as our competitors with less sails would be a clear defeat. We have therefore ventured south in our approaches to St Lucia, as you may have seen on the plot. There are two purposes with this; firstly, a sharper angle to the wind gives us better speed with genoa only. Without the spinnaker it is very slow to go straight downwind. The sharper angle and deviation south cost some miles, but that may be compensated by more favourable winds later. The last 36 hrs shows that despite being lightly dressed, CoCo is keeping in contact. Secondly, the weather forecasts show signs of very light and difficult winds in the area between us and St Lucia for the coming days. Our present bet is that we will be less affected by this the more south our final approach is.

Anyway, we all agree that the competition is only a very small piece of this whole experience, and our joy and pride of a safe arrival in St Lucia is not going to be affected by the result. Having said that, having a plan and participating in a competition is interesting and motivating, which is why we are excited about still having cards in the game.

Henrik cracked the code today of automatically adding the daily position list into our navigation software, through the ‘back door’, as waypoints. We now have all 200 boats spread out on the chart itself, meaning that we can see the same thing as you can. A huge number of dots moving west in the Atlantic, with CoCo being in the front pack. That’s a pretty cool picture! It is also very interesting to visualise the north/south separation of our group, reference made to the strategies explained above.

All well on-board and thanks for following!