Tales from the TJV

Sam Davies on life on board Team Cowes and how they plan to nobble VMI

This afternoon and Nick Moloney and Sam Davies on board Team Cowes are battling to make up ground on VMI, who has taken fifth place off them. While Nick Moloney is up on deck munching a chocolate bar in his Musto shorts with Kylie blaring out (Sam's choice), it is Sam Davies who comes on the phone.


TDS: Where are you?

Sam Davies: Just coming up to 7degS, just a bit north of Recife, the bit that sticks out of Brazil. On MaxSea we’ve got 496 miles to go of our proposed route, which is not entirely direct. It says that our ETA is 19th at 0443GMT. So one full night and one day left and the last night we approach. And we are 30ish miles behind VMI and desperately trying to keep up with them but they are just faster than us. And they got a bit more breeze than we did first and it is really hard [haven’t we heard this expression somewhere else? Ed]. We are doing everything we can, but can’t sail this boat any faster than we are right now. They have just got that little edge. We have one more try at getting back at them which will happen later tonight.

"We’ve got 16 knots from 140deg, we’re sailing 200 and we have true wind at 80-90deg, so we have got genoa and full mail, sailing at 12-16 knots. Last night was really cool, I came on watch and it was blowing about 17 knots and a couple of hours into the watch this long gust of 22 knots came through and I cracked all the sheets off and as the wind went aft to about 110 true wind angle and suddenly we were just doing 20 knots solid, no a surf, it was just continuous boat speed and there was just spray everywhere. The whole boat was just humming. It was brilliant. So I did that for another hour and then I woke Nick up and he came on deck and just as I went down below the wind dropped!

"I thought quite a couple of time about Jonathan McKee and Sam Manuard, because we were in that territory but I don’t think it wasn’t remotely threatening on our rig, it was just perfect fast sailing. We had the safe rig up. It was loaded up to start with but once we were up on the plane it probably wasn’t that loaded up at all, you just worry about hitting things.

TDS: Is being to the west no longer a benefit?

SD: It was to start with, obviously because we caught up with VMI but the risk we took having to sail that bit higher out of the Doldrums into the first part of the southeast trades, obviously we didn’t manage to hang in there quite as much as we had hoped. So we came out there about the same behind them as did when we started our westerly game plan. So all in all it was probably a 0% gain and a 0% loss. Anyway we tried it and we were looking pretty good for a while. It could have worked and it could have been a lot worse. If we had followed them we probably would have ended up more behind. We needed that fast passage to the Doldrums because as we got out the door closed behind us and half the guys are still stuck there. So if we had followed them we would have been slower in and we would have lost out even more. So what we did was for sure it was the right thing to do.

TDS: Is there a boat speed problem?

SD: I think VMI have done quite a lot of work on her with her new rig and they have spent quite a lot of money optimising things and we haven’t done anything with Team Cowes for over a year now in terms of optimising the boat in terms of the latest development in this class. Whoever takes this boat next will probably have a look at that and see where we can make it faster. There are certainly things we can do.

I don’t think it is the way we are sailing it. I don’t think we could do much more than we are doing now. Sometime you look back at things and you think ‘oh maybe we could have saved half a day there with one reef too much in' or 'we didn’t take a reef out early enough' or 'we lost a load of time blowing up that spinnaker' - but we’ve had nothing like that. Even our headsail changes, where sometimes it would easier to do a quick bear away and change them, we are changing them in line on the direct course.

TDS: So what is the cunning plan?

SD: You’ll find out!

TDS: Is it straight line or are there local effects you can make use of?

SD: There are definitely fluctations in the breeze and there are some land related differences and there are also some gradient changes happening in the next two days. Between those there is certainly a good option and a bad option to sail this last bit of the course, so we are going to see if we can hopefully get on the right side of the shift and the pressure and try and make a gain from that.

TDS: Are you running out of anything?

SD: We didn’t have any suncream on the boat. I had a special bottle of face sun cream and I found in my kit back some Nivea Factor 10 so that’s the only thing we’ve been scraping around for. I even found a bottle of coke tucked away on the windward side and a couple of oranges but they have mouldy patches on them, so I might have to commit them to the deep.

I HAVE got one sachet of Timotei and one sachet of Pantene ProV conditioner so after this phone call I am going to use them. We even have enough water to have a little fresh water rinse. So I am going for the much needed hair wash.

TDS: It must be really hot there still?

SD: It is really hot, but because we have been so fast the whole race it has been oilskins with spray coming over the boat the whole time. So you either get wet and itchy or you wear your oilskins. Normally you wear your oilskins. The spray just makes you so salty. So everything is just damp and salty and we are quite unpleasant. There’s no sunbathing on the poop deck that’s for sure. We’re just hiding from the constant spray.