AZAB Return |
| Friday, 06 July 2007 |
| Well the beards have gone and its now back to work on this side of the world after Allen Clarke and Ron Gould’s brief sojourn into the Atlantic. The question most commonly asked on this trip was where is that high pressure?
Non existent and now assumed to be merely a myth.
The trip down tooks eight days and fifteen hours and left us fifth in class, not the best position and clearly we had not pushed Sage hard enough as the jobs list in Punta Delgada revealed, sure we had 55 knots across the deck and had blown the mainsail off its mast track connectors (I had checked we had spares, but we had to wait until it was safe to go back on the foredeck to re-attach the sail) and other than all the usual tiny little bosuns’ jobs that need dealing with we had little to do in Sao Miguel. The Club Navale showed exceptional hospitality to all the competitors and the 24hr bar was much used and appreciated.
The return leg started more aggressively as we needed to pull off a real coup if we were going to get a podium finish. Though the majority of the sailors are Corinthian entries and the yachts very diverse from 30 year old Nicholson 32’s to the very latest J122 there are no slackers out there on the water. As usual for the Azores start there is on offer the choice to go East or West around the island we looked at a weather chart an hour before leaving the dock and made our choice to go East. With only ten percent of the fleet choosing this option and as we sat windless with three other competitors, an old 50’ aluminium two tonner and a Storm 33 my reckoning was that this was the dud option.
It was not until five days later did we re-join the fleet and found ourselves sailing the rest of the way with two other fellow competitors’ sails on our horizon. This trip back was harder as we stayed on the same starboard tack the entire time, wind on the beam, and seldom could we fly the kite for long periods, dodging some very large whales and even bigger fishing boats the return leg just seemed to throw up obstacles that slowed us down. Since we sailed with limited communications and relied on picking up weather info from the intermittent Navtex or listening on the VHF to other competitors we figured we were losing ground all the time. In the early hours of Thursday 28th June Sage crossed the Falmouth finish line after eight days and sixteen hours of sailing and in a surprising third position. We will be going to the prize giving after all!
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