It’s Tuesday afternoon and we are now at the halfway point on the first leg, 550nm to go until we reach the San Blas Islands.

It was a relief to start the rally after the week of preparation in St Lucia. We prepared Offbeat with the Code 65 sail hoisted and furled before we left the dock as we knew the first leg down to Castries would be a broad reach until we reached the turning mark. The Code 65 is on a furler and is very quick to roll out so it also wouldn’t be a distracting us from avoiding the other 24 boats on the start line. In the end the fleet was very shy of the line (after all there was 1100nm to go). We were first to cross it with the three largest monohulls the Baltic 67, Manyeleti, the Farr 585CC, Gypsy Soul, and our friends on the Farr 65, Celeste, in close company behind.

After an hour we had reached the turning mark at Castries, the 3 larger yachts had just passed us as had Gordon and Sharon on their little rocket ship “Take Two”; this is a JPK45 (a french design with a racing heritage). They were clearly racing hard with their large assymetric gennaker but watching them work it was clear they would struggle to keep the pace up for 1100 miles although they had an impressive first leg. We furled the Code 65 as we approached the mark, gybed then unfurled it again and set off at pace for the next 5-6 hours, overhauling Celeste and Gypsy Soul.

As night fell we saw a string of squalls building up ahead on the radar. In the end all 5 leading boats gybed away as we didn’t know how much wind was in them but they looked fairly nasty. Gybing the Code 65 is a bit of a saga was we usually haul the tack of the sail to the windward hull when on a long leg. The process to gybe is:

  • Move the tack back to the bowsprit (David on the starboard bow controlling the barber haul line; Adrian winching the tack line back to the centerline)
  • Furl the Code 65 this is a difficult job, as the new furling line is only 8mm thick and we actually need 10mm, as a result we need 2 people on the furler (Anne-Laure and either Adrian or David) plus Lucy on the bow to maintain extra tension if the line slips. This is as a result of mismatch between Catana documentation and what the Facnor furler actually needs. We have a new line being couriered out to Panama to meet us.
  • Remove the preventer on the mainsail boom
  • Bring the main into the centreline
  • Gybe the main over and ease it out
  • Unfurl the Code 65
  • Haul it back to the opposite bow (reversing step 1) – the (optional) winches on the bow are a great aid
  • Trim the code 65
  • Move the preventer to the other side and secure it.

Suffice it to say this isn’t quick and Anne-Laure politely pointed out that having done it once in the dark we weren’t going to do it again!

So for those who were wondering why we went so far south overnight that’s the answer. We needed to wait until dawn to gybe back again, by which time we were nearly 50nm south of the rhumb line. Of course this was all in the master plan as the routing suggested that there would be stronger winds to the south and so it turned out (thank goodness).

As a result for the last couple of days we’ve been trying the other alternatives for heading straight downwind. On the left the Parasailor, a great sail for running downwind in shifty conditions as we can move 20 degrees either side without gybing. The only challenge is we can only carry it in up to about 20 knots of wind. Great for night 2 but last night the wind got up to 25kts and rain and we had to drop it (not easy as we had to hoist the main first of all) and then drop it on the foredeck (which we did about 9pm – in the dark again).

Currently we are using the option on the right: sailing “wing on wing” or goosewinged with the mainsail out on one side and the genoa on the other. It’s about the same speed as the Parasailor but we can’t change direction much. The good news is that it’s easy to reef and we are expecting much more wind tomorrow so we’ll probably stay like this tonight.

That was a fairly technical post, I’ll try to limit these and I would like to talk about all the fish we’ve caught but……. oh well.

Perhaps more on food and the culinary delights on board for the next post. Tonight we pass the waypoint keeping us well off the Columbia/Venezualan border. I wonder why they did that??