Goodchild adds, “The conditions have changed so the mode has changed but I am very aware, I remember on The Ocean Race last year that we went round Cape Horn and then got hit by 50 knots that could have had us out the race. So this time I was a little more prepared for it. And so there are still 7,000 miles to go, that is two Route du Rhums, two Transats, that is not to be taken lightly and the South Atlantic is tricky and will leave us some good memories too.”
“Yesterday was fairly full on between checking the boat, going up to the bow and baling it out, checking the back, getting the J Zero up which Iost in the water – so getting that out and getting it furled, stacking all the sails forwards which have been at the back of the boat for the last six weeks and then I was aiming for the Le Maire Straits and I did not want to go to sleep aiming for land, so all of that meant I was pretty tired when I got out of the Le Maire Straits and I could get some sleep. And then this morning with the flat water when my alarm went off after my hour and 15 minutes of sleep I was fully glued to the bed, I probably listened to it for ten minutes before I could get myself out of bed. I did that twice and so that really topped up the batteries again, so physically being able to catch up on some sleep this afternoon with a couple of naps.
And now we are back into light winds in the lee of the Falklands I have the J Zero back up again which I was hoping to avoid but I hopefully wont use it for more than a couple of hours and it is not a complete waste of energy.”
“The South Atlantic looks like it will leave us with some memories, It is very far from easy, the files are moving, there are no two files the same between the models, between run times. They do agree we will have 40 knots upwind in a couple of days time and all the routings do kind of take is into ‘fairy tale land’ reaching in a band of wind where one side is upwind and the other there is no wind or going through the middle of a low off the Argentinian coast and popping out the other side by magic, just trying to find a way to make that work when it all changes on the next update is it. It is about minimising risk in terms of boat breaking as well as racing tactically against the other boats. And so at the moment I will go up the east side of the Falklands as that is what everyone else is doing and I think it is a more realistic game plan as opposed to going west around the centre of newly formed depressions which appear one in one place and one day later in another, all seems a little bit unrealistic. Risk here is getting into a patch of lighter winds and the only way of finding that out is to try it.”
hard times for Isa
The weekend proved especially cruel and tough for Isabelle Joschke (MACSF) who has suffered a whole series of problems topped off by the loss of her starboard foil,
“I had a big chain of events, with my starboard foil breaking, a problem on the keel that was resolved because in the end it was only the sensor that was faulty, a part of my mainsail traveller that broke, my mainsail that tore, the engine problem that was only partially resolved and that made me feel like I was on borrowed time... a good little chain of events! So frankly it really tired me out, I had to intervene many times, it took me a lot of time, and above all it took a lot of energy at times when the boat was going very very fast and it was dangerous to just move around in the boat to go and check things... It was very trying, it causes vertebrae to compress, it hits and you're not in a good position, it creates big tensions in the body! I have a lot of tension in my upper back, I already had a loose rib, it just got worse, so I feel really exhausted.”
