© Sam Davies
Hello everyone!
I have had a busy day on board Roxy. As predicted we have run into an area of light wind. The whole fleet has slowed down, and now it will be interesting to see who escapes first....
Calms are often worse than storms, and at first I started to imagine that all the others were sailing fast and it was just me stuck becalmed.
At one point there was so little wind I rolled away the Code 0 because it was trying to destroy itself flapping around; The thing is that there is a swell out here, so even though there is no wind, Roxy is rolling around and that flings the sails around wildly. I was worried that the main was going to break something on the mast too but I couldn't face dropping it, as that would be a sure way that the wind would come straight back and I would have to pull all 150kg of it up again!
Luckily the position reports show me that I am not alone in this frustration and all the others are showing similarly shameful speeds!
Once I saw that, it was easier to cope with and to take my mind off the dismal eta, I did my boat-checks.
Erwan has sent me a list of things to check on board, which is a great help as i can go around the boat and tick them off one by one. I did all the checks and everything is fine. But i did find a couple of "gremlins"
(a bolt working its way loose on my pilot ram, a wire disconnected from my spare pilot ....) So I managed to fix these potential problems before they could have caused bigger damage!
Now there is a little bit more wind, totally the opposite direction to what I was expecting, but we are moving along and that sound of water trickling along the side of the hull is making me happy!
Now the important thing is to make sure that Roxy is going as fast as possible at all times, and in these light and fickle winds that is a full-time job (night and day)!
Sam x
