Pirate news

The Black Pearl has arrived in Cape Town reports Paul Cayard

The Black Pearl arrived in Cape Town yesterday, November 27 after an uneventful flight on the Antonov 124. She was then transported to 'Pirate City', in the harbour area, which will be our base of operations for the next four weeks. We again want to thank our partner Pescanova for their generous and useful support to the team by making the flight to Cape Town possible.

The shore team is arriving in Cape Town this week after getting a well deserved week off. Basically they had gone hard since early August without a break. The crew is taking this week off and will arrive in Cape Town on 7 December. The goals of this week are for the shore team to install the new wedges and bomber doors for the keel and finish up a few other jobs on the boat. The plan is to be sailing by 10 December and then go offshore on 12 December for a few days of ocean sailing and sea trialing to make sure all is well with the repairs.

Leg 2 will be one of the most demanding of the race for both the boat and the crew physically. I don't think either can possibly be overprepared so I think we are using our bit of bad luck on Leg 1 to gain a leg up on Leg 2.

After we return, we will then have two events on 16 and 17 December. On the 16th we will have a presentation of the team and the boat to 1000 school children of Cape Town. On the 17th we have a corporate sailing day for Disney.

The next race for us is the in port race on 26 December. Obviously, we will be looking to get some good scores in the next few races to try to recover what we lost on leg one. As I said before, this is a long event and there may be other breakdowns.

Here are all the events in this race and the points that are available from each. As you can see, there are a lot of scoring events beyond leg 1:

Scoring points	In port	Leg waypoints	Legs	Tot
In port Sanxenxo	3.5			3.5
Noronha		3.5		7
Cape Town			7	14
In port Cape Town	3.5			17.5
Kerguelen		3.5		21
Eclipse Islands		3.5		24.5
Melbourne			7	31.5
In port Melbourne	3.5			35
Wellington			7	42
Ice Waypoint		3.5		45.5
Cape Horn		3.5		49
Rio			7	56
In port Rio	3.5			59.5
Noronha		3.5		63
Baltimore			7	70
In port Baltimore	3.5			73.5
New York			7	80.5
Lizard			3.5	84
Portsmouth			7	91
In port Portsmouth	3.5			94.5
Rotterdam			7	101.5
In port Rotterdam	3.5			105
Gothenburg			7	112
Total	24.5	24.5	63	112
Total %	22%	22%	56%	100%