Race Day! Boats assemble for trip down to CV Islands
Nusquama Sailing Blog
Sun 5 Nov 2023 11:00
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Although no-one is being remotely competitive ..(???*?) there was quite a bit of regatta fever getting ready for the start at 1300. There was a start sequence of 10 minutes, 5 minutes, go with first gun at 1250. Most of the boats stayed well behind the line as no-one was looking to have any racing incidents/damage to their boats on the start of an 850 NM sail. We were filled with stories of the terrible winds caused by the ‘acceleration zone’ to the south of Gran Canaria and the equally terrible prospect of being caught in the ‘wind shadow’ to the south west. Our race plan was to sail east by 5 miles and then go south, thus avoiding all these traps. As it turned out the best route was to ignore all the warnings and follow the rhumb line (straightest path to our destination) with full sail, so we missed out a bit on this and had a slow first day.
However we did get going well eventually and put up our Oxley sail - the parasailer. We started off with a watch system of 3 hours on, 3 hours off with two on watch. This was for the new crew - Mike and Robin - to get used to the boat. We quickly switched on day 2, to 2 hours on 6 hours off with single person watches which was much better. Susannah suffered with 2 days of flu-like symptoms which happily cleared up but felt very under the weather for a bit.
