| Thoughts on Cheyenne |
| Thursday, 10 March 2005 |
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We went round Los Lobos Island yesterday afternoon after another rough night up the coast of Argentina. The mouth of the River Plate gave us calmer conditions for the last 6 hours and we shot up to Uruguay at close to 30 knots. At the island we did the transfer of film and with the help of Raffaella and Will in a small RIB. We stopped for about 10 minutes waiting for the RIB to catch us and then we were off again, just getting a brief glimpse of the coastline before we headed offshore. It was quite a clean rounding with breeze all the time. It’s an area where it would be easy to be becalmed for a long time so we were lucky.
About 3 hours later we heard the news that Cheyenne had dismasted and was out of the race, and was about to be towed to Argentina. It is an incredible shame for Dave and his crew, they had gotten around Cape Horn and well over the half waypoint and were catching us up. I gave Dave a call and sent our best wishes from all of our team, especially Damian, Jacques and Fraser, who also sailed on Cheyenne with Dave and Mark on the RTW record last year. We are all very happy to hear that nobody was hurt and that they will be enjoying an Argentinian Asado meal in the not too distant future. Certainly if it had happened 2000 miles before they would have had a very unenviable sail through the Southern Ocean to Chile, with no mast and a boom that would be very difficult to erect as a jury rig. I hope to see Cheyenne reborn soon with a new mast and ready for the next race around the world in 2006.
I made a calculation of all RTW trips on maxi-multihulls and there has only been a 50% success ratio of getting to the finish without stopping or having a major problem. I guess this race is no different. We all have our fingers crossed that statistics can't lie, and that Daedalus and Doha 2006 make it back to Doha. For us that’s over 8500 miles away and that’s a lot of ocean to cross, and a lot more fatigue on the boat. We are still sailing as smartly and alertly as possible, but there is also now that extra element of caution, both in our choice of routing, and in how hard we push the boat. It’s a marathon and we have to get to the finish line. That old adage, 'to finish first, first you have to finish', is never truer than for us right now.
For the next few days we are looking at good downwind conditions towards the bottom of Africa. Right now we have 30 knots of breeze from astern and a beautiful tradewind sky as we charge eastwards. All is good on board, Andy had to spend his entire 4 hour night watch repairing the outhaul purchase system and that is now up and running again. Otherwise we are in good shape. On board we are starting to look ahead to the Indian Ocean and that is going to be a very tricky Ocean to cross, in both the south and the north. We have got the Admiralty Ocean Passages of the World tome, and out of interest we are looking at the routes that the old sailing ships took to get around to India and the Middle East before the Suez Canal was built. It looks like a lot of light airs, but those old clipper ships are not still there, so I am sure that we can get in before the food runs low, on Day 60.. It’s a very changeable ocean particularly the South Indian, so we are going to have to wait a few days before looking at the possible routes with the help of all the tools of modern meteorology.
Brian
www.maxicatdoha.com
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