Sophie Luther's Round Gotland diary

No sleep, poor food and a tetchy crew on board the Volvo Ocean 60 Avant

From on board the Volvo Ocean 60 Avant, (the former Intrum Justitia) Pindar girl Sophie Luther writes:

Everyone is absolutely shattered. We have all been up all night. I’ve just been given a hot dog, so I’m feeling a bit better. We had some pasta salad last night. It was 99% reconstituted pasta, 1% ham and no sauce. Doesn’t really constitute pasta salad does it?

We’ve had a really hard battle with JMS this morning. It started at dawn, which here is about 4am as it never really gets dark. All morning we’ve been match racing them down the side of the island.

They got to within about ½ a mile of us and now we’ve made a bit of a truce. All the tacks were getting slower and slower as everyone got more and more tired and it was obvious to see that happening on both boats.

In the real light weather, they’re faster than us, but above 10 knots, we’re equal - hence why we have had to match race them as we couldn’t actually keep up with their boat speed when the wind dropped.

While we were busy fighting with JMS this morning, AV-Teknik came out of nowhere and now she’s right on our tail, half a mile behind us and in front of JMS, so that’s a pretty interesting development.

The next leg will be a two sail reach. Although we won't have the tacking and stacking which is so energy draining, we will be continuously changing headsails which is also pretty tiring.

Last night it was absolutely freezing. It was awful. There were no clouds and I wore everything I had. Now, everyone is pretty techy and no one is feeling particularly great.

We did start a watch system last night: three hours on, three hours off. The first watch got their three hours off, then five minutes into my watch we were up on deck and stayed their for the next three hours, changing headsails and tacking. When you do go down below, you just pray that the wind doesn’t do anything and you can get some sleep for half an hour or so.

Otherwise all the weight has to be on the rail. The sails are all tied on and when we tack we have to untie them and drag them across the deck. It’s a big palava. We have decided that we must be mad to like offshore racing. We had had a wind speed of 22 knots at one point and were bashing into every wave.

Of course it will all be different when we beat JMS and are back in Sandhamn!