25.11. - All In

High amount of traffic during the night, we saw at least 4-5 other yachts, all heading south, not along the shortest route that they originally selected... And a huge oil tanker that passed us at closer than 1 nautical mile. Success in ARC is in great way dependent on the success of your strategy. Will you head far south to the longer route and hope that with steady and reliable wind it will pay off? Or will you take the shortest route, more north, and risk encountering a low pressure front, which means very unstable winds from dead calm sea to close to storm wind speed at 15-25 metres/second and you can't get them against you.

We were all-in, the shortest route. Il Capitano spends a lot of time at the chart table navigating and investigating weather reports. This is his fourth crossing, and he wants to win. He did that last time. Wind is forecasted to continue as they are for the foreseeable future, that is, 3-4 days so our strategy would seem to pay off at this stage. From 200 boats 40 has selected the same tactic, the rest chose south.

Night was quite unexciting sailing with winds from 7-10 m/s flying the butterfly.
Not surprisingly in the break of the day, everyone was eager to get the spinnaker up again. With a bit more wind than yesterday and perhaps too much self-confidence, it took a couple up and down exercises to get the spinnaker flying. We gained 2 knots of speed. With this turbo-booster we manage to speed up and clock 185 nautical miles during the 3rd 24 hours. It was in all aspects close to our first sailing day, winds at from 6-15 m/s from straight behind, boat speed steadily at 9-11 knots. When we got a message that we were leading our own class race, it gave us an ego boost to trim the sails. After such a perfect sailing day, it was a pity to take down the spinnaker and set the butterfly set-up for the night. However, it is important to remember that this is a long-haul race. To succeed one has to be significantly consistent and consistently significant.

Today’s yachts resemble cars in at least one point - problems with electronics. Our communication laptop has been dead for 2 days now. Olli has been nominated as the IT guru of the team and he has spent hours and hours setting up the reserve PC, but without success.

I called home and heard that our position in the ARC Fleet Viewer had shown that we had turned back. Combined with our communication problem, this had caused concerns among families at home, however I’m happy to say that everything is great on the boat and we are totally enjoying the ride.

Hannu