Forging on

Good progress for Steve Fossett's Cheyenne, despite downtime making repairs

Position at 0505 GMT: 53deg 23.940S 111deg 40.600W
Course/speed: 095deg 26.0 knots
TWS/TWA: 31.0 knots/329deg

Cheyenne continues to make good progress towards Cape Horn, despite four hours down time yesterday when they slowed to effect repairs. Despite this they covered 480 miles in the last 24 hours and are now 1,513 miles from Cape Horn.

Brian Thompson writes from on board:

As we push on towards the Horn we have 1750 left to run, and the outline of Tierra del Fuego is starting to appear on the nav software on our laptops. We finally have a waypoint to go around now after 21 days in the Southern Ocean, where up till now making easting was the basic goal; and the only features have been the ever-changing isobars, fronts and ridges showing on our weather downloads.

We are looking at 4 days to go and a rounding sometime on Tuesday. The weather is very changeable, with a big low chasing hard on our heels, but we appear to be in the best possible position to out run it and avoid slow conditions all around us. As Steve says, the weather forecasts always change, so it may not turn out to be such a smooth run after all. But now things are good and we are charging eastward at 25 to 30 knots.

Last night turned into a trial as a ridge of high pressure caught us up and shifted the wind from the SW through the W and then NW. That is all good except that with a big swell from the south, the transition to the new course was very rough as we were lifted on our old starboard gybe. Just as we were about to gybe over on to the present port gybe, one of our old bottom battens broke. So we had to put in 3 reefs, gybe with the solent and then begin work on extracting the 15 m long broken batten and repairing it on
deck.

This operation took about 6 hours and involved most of the team. Once the batten was repaired we changed to the staysail, turned the boat upwind and parked the boat head to wind and commenced the long grind up of the mainsail. This took everybody and at least 15 minutes before we could finally get sailing again on course.

So we estimate that we lost 40 miles with that fateful flick of the mainsail that broke the batten.

Brian