Atlantic letters

Former Pindar teammates Miranda Merron and Emma Richards report from the TJV monohull and multihull fleets still racing

With the retirement of Gitana and other trimarans at the back of the multihull fleet, the Pindar girls now have no one to race against and their boat (the former Lokata) constantly sounds like she is going to break up. Emma Richards skipper of Pindar Systems has been humming and harring about retiring:

What a struggle. Our aim to finish this race, complete the course has been unaltered until this morning. We have been bashing this boat upwind which she hates with a passion and keeps telling us so!

Over every wave, every few seconds, we can hear cracking sounds, some of which we are used to, some new over the past few days!

It's the sounds of tearing carbon fibre and the sound goes right through your body every time, luckily we know that most of these are interior and are simply the amount of movement of the hull and the beams, the twisting movement of the main hull bends everything so the interior doesn't quite fit right over some of the waves.

It sounds Iike the chart table and surrounding structure are coming away form the hull - the centreboard casing moves inches either way inside the boat and therefore everything attached to it too - the diesel tank compartment, also the dorade box.

But the question came up this morning at what point do we retire and decide enough is enough? None of these things in themselves would allow us to make it an easy decision to retire.

We wrote an email this morning to all the people involved in the project to get their thoughts and spoke to Adrienne Cahalan who weather routes us. Adrienne advised that whatever way we look at it, we have another 2-3 days upwind to Ascension Island. I spoke to Andrew Pindar, who as always came up with great words at the right time, that he would understand if we made the decision to retire or if we would continue!

Since the retirement of the boats around us, it has been a motivational struggle. We were having a great battle with Gitana and then to have caught up to less than 100miles from Biscuits la Trinitaine and Eure et Loire, it was turning out to be a great race for us!

Two days since then the other boats retired and the uphill struggle shows little reward except getting 120miles closer to Ascension Island each day but still 600 miles behind the new second last place boat. This has been a demoralising, personally character destroying experience and we have wanted it to end as soon as possible.