Today got started very early. We needed to leave the dock by 6:00 am to make the start line on time.
The motor out was peaceful, as I said, Winter Harbour is a beautiful bit of rugged country!
The breeze was out of the North East today, light, maybe 7-8 knots shich meant a spinny start. We got a very good mid line start and had the kite up in short order.
As mentioned earlier, the RC and PRO wanted us to get out and around Brooks before the forcasted Gale was to arrive later this morning. Only the very fastest boats were able to sail through the transition zone just a couple miles up from the start. The rest of us were left with very light conditions and even drifting for a good hour.
Finally we managed to get a breath of air and were off, slowly at first but within an hour or 2 it was blowing 20 and out to sea we headed.
We were one of only 4 boats in our division to escape first, with Kiva / Kotuku and that darn Hobbie chasing hard but we had a good head start on the rest of the boats.....actually they were never to be seen again till morning.
We planned to head out to about 30 - 35 miles offshore to get some current help. We were not alone as it seemed everyone else had the same plan. We were pacing Kiva, sailing slightly higher but they had some speed on us, but net result was even. We would be sailing with them all afternoon and into the dark of night.
The breeze continued to build it was a steady 25 maybe gusting to 30 but managable. The bigger issues were the seas. They were quite short and steep, and very confused. They were coming from 2 and sometimes 3 different directions. This made driving very difficult and the boat was left to just slam hard from wave to wave, shuttering every 30 seconds it would seem.
At around 11:00 pm, we were going along when our instruments decided to fail again. So now we have no vision, no numbers, a reef and #3 up in what seems like a building storm. Down below we have very cold crew, some sick, some unable to function. The little voice inside me reminds the boat will always take more than what the crew will so I am quite confident in the ol' girl. She is doing great, and so are we.
We do our midnight check in ( we are required to check in to the Coast Guard every 6 hours with a positional grid system provided to us the by the RC and a status report ) We hear of some boats really struggling with sea sickness, one boat hit a whale and had to return to Winter Harbour, one boat lost power and feared they would lose instruments - we laughed at that one as we already had that issue - many boats taking on water, boats losing wind vanes ect.........but none the less, most were coping.
To sail at night is quite an experience! To do so with no instruments in a gale in large confused seas is another. We keep track of a port bow light of a competitor. By keeping it in the same spot under the main sail we know we are sailing high enough or too high. We can see the luff of the main and keep it with a nice speed bubble or back wind to help understand heel and boat speed.
At around 3:00 am we see a bright light on the horizon. At first we think it is the sun but it is too early for sunrise. We then figure it must be a cruise ship, but we are 40 miles off shore, really a cruise ship out here????? It is getting closer and Don and I can't tell if it is going to cross us or not. We try to slow the boat up but again that is hard to do without crash tacking. Then we hear there horn, is that for us? We are with Cu Na Mara just to leeward of us and are watching them as well. Finally we can tell they are not going to cross us but it was a nervous few moments! A second ship came shortly after but followed the others path and there were no issues.
Finally the lights turned back on around 4:15. We had survived and actually done quite well. At 6:00 am for the roll call we were rewarded with news that we were in the grid closest to the finish for division! Bot bad for a bunch of blind sailors!!
Then it happened, around 6:30 the forcasted switch to a westerly came and we were set up perfect for it. We had 32 miles to go, straight down wind and the breeze was down to a nice 15 knots or so. The bad news was the sea state was both for and against us.
We scrambled to get more hands on deck and get a kite set up. We did so and were off, surfing along doing 10+ knots! Then the unthinkable happened, the sprit broke off after just 15 minutes of down wind fun! It broke roughly a foot in front of the exit point of the boat. We were dejected, that's it, were done I thought. Well I have to say the guys did an amazing job getting the boat back to Uecuelet, under jib and main only! We couldn't surf the boat beyond hull speed to protect against water pouring inside. So we watched painfully as boats sailed up from behind us and either pass us or make up time to correct over us.
We finished the leg in roughly 31 hours, we lost at least an hour as boats that we saw when we first put the kite up finished an hour or more ahead of us.
We still finished 6th for this leg, just 12 seconds back of Night Runner.
But the real story is of how our crew pulled together and came up with a plan to get a new sprit built to allow us to continue on with the race and how our fellow PRYC club members back home made it happen!
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