We crossed the finish line just off the coast of Panama on Friday afternoon at 16:40 local time after 6 days sailing. It is a 60nm line north to south, at a Longitude of W78 35.00, which we had to cross from East to West. It was positioned to allow the fleet to either head south to the San Blas Islands or continue West to Shelter Bay and the Panama canal. The final approach was pretty tense for two reasons.

Firstly it became clear during the afternoon that our course was converging with NoLa. This is the largest catamaran on the rally, a Voyage 580, with two families on board. The Nock’s and the Lacey’s (hence name), each family has three cabins in each hull. They have 5 teenagers on board, 4 boys and a girl.

They had been well ahead but had torn their downwind spinnaker and then sailed into the calm patch (which we had headed away from to the West on Thursday evening to avoid). With the two boats neck and neck there was suddenly some serious “rallying” going on to see who would cross the line first for 5th place on line honours.

As we approached the finish, with about a mile to go, we suddenly saw each other just as a massive squall approached. As we both have Starlink high speed satellite communications we said “hi” and shared videos of each other and also with the fleet on the wider WhatsApp Group.

The radar image shows the second reason: the purple is light rain, the red is intense rain and the yellow is ridiculously torrential rain (and probably other nasty stuff).

Unfortunately with about 5 minutes to go the squall struck us. It was easily the nastiest one we’d seen all week. Winds above 20kts (not so scary) but rain so heavy we could hardly see Will, Heather, Paul and Angela and their families only a few hundred metres away. Then the scary stuff started, crashes of thunder in the air right above us.

Approaching the finish of leg 1

The gust of wind accelerated us past Nola and we crossed the finish about 5 mins ahead of them. From our racing were are very occasionally used to having a finished marked with a gun (on the occasions at Cowes Week when we have finished on the podium from time to time). However this is the first time the finish was marked by two enormous guns and bright flashes of light… two lightning strikes on either side of the boat, one appeared to be only 150m from us.

No celebrations of a finish this time, just mild terror as we wanted to get out of there fast! The challenge is getting the Parasailor down quickly is never fast and can’t be rushed. Fortunately we’ve done it a few times now and the well oiled machine got going and we dropped the sail in about 5 or 6 minutes. The lightning was still all around us and worse to the West so our priority was to turn nearly 180 degrees and head away from the storm.

Unfortunately this is where we made a little mistake resulting in the spinnaker halliard getting wrapped around the top of the genoa. No worries, we’ll sort it out later, so the engine went on for the first time in a week and we headed away from the storm to set off for the San Blas Islands some 60 miles away. Within 15 minutes we’d escaped the storms clutches and settled down for a very slow (5 knots) cruise to arrive in the islands at dawn.

First leg over safely. A few bits to sort out, as ever but all safe and sound. We crossed the line as 2nd multihull, the first catamaran Ruaj finished just over an hour ahead but had motored for 12 hours through the light winds. We’ll be surprised if we haven’t won the leg on handicap, with Nola second (also motored for a handful of hours but a faster boat on paper) and Ruaj third (who sailed very well with their tradewind sail). But who cares about the results (answers on a paper please) … it is a rally!

We are looking forward to the San Blas, apparently idyllic, and we are getting to know the fleet already thanks to the pre-start socials and lots of banter on the WhatsApp groups on the way across the Caribbean!