Sophie Luther Round Gotland diary

Job done - exhausted and back on dry land

Tired, but relieved Pindar girl Sophie Luther writes from Sandhamn:

After the most tiring race, we are all ecstatic over our win against JMS, which is what we set out to do and was our main goal. We have spent the last 42 hours pushing ourselves to the limit and finally we’ve come through. We’ve been match racing to the best of our ability throughout.

I’ve spent most of the last 42 hours awake, with only about five hours sleep, so life is feeling a little slow and lazy at the moment, but at the end of the day it was all worth it.

The most nervous bit of the race had to be the last reach in from the lighthouse to Sandhamn as even though we knew we had the win, we were still very conscious of the fact that JMS were only two minutes behind us. I have learnt how to push myself in this race and how to perform under extreme fatigue and pressure.

There was a point yesterday when the whole team was getting ratty with each other and arguing, but we got over that once we had all slept for an hour each and we realised that the small problems were meaningless compared to the bigger picture.

We have spent the last 24 hours stacking sails forwards and backwards in the boat, ballasting water in and out and just trying to keep the speed up.

The difference between the boats I’ve sailed before and the Volvo 60 is the fact that you can stack the boat to allow the trim to be far better than it would be in normal racing conditions. Just the weight added from this means that you go a knot and a half faster in most directions. I didn’t realise how relevance this was until Mikke pointed it out to us all and showed us how it changed our boat speed compared with the other competitors.

We carried on eating pasta salad but we added a few meatballs, which was the highlight of those few hours. Our cook managed to fall down the hatch several times during the evening, which amused us greatly. And during the peels, he kept falling over as if someone had moved the deck.

We know that tomorrow’s windward/leewards are going to be hard and that we’ve got to prove that our inshore racing is as good as our offshore, but we’re confident. We believe that the first boats will be match racing each other and trying to push each other out, which is exactly what our team will be doing with JMS. Potentially AV-Teknik could come first in all three races!