From The Pearl

Paul Cayard reports on the start and Bass Strait

Sent: 12 February 2006 20:44

Well, we had a great start and that made us all feel good for about 30 minutes. Then the wind died where we were and it all started to get weird.

It was a long day on Port Philip Bay while we all waited for the sea breeze to fill. It finally did and we were well positioned for that being most west. We got going first and had the lead at Mornington with ABN AMRO One coming up fast. It did not take them long to pass us upwind in 22 knots of wind, both us of us on J4s and full mains. Meanwhile movistar, Ericsson and Brasil were having a good battle just behind us.

When we got outside the entrance to the Bay, the wind was 24 knots and the sea was very rough. There were enough helicopters around to make four feature films so they must have gotten some good footage there.

Things progressed well from there with us and ABN AMRO One making some small gains on the group. Then, around 000 local time, we caught ABN AMRO One and they set a course to pass behind and to leeward of us. They eventually came back out in front by ¼ of a mile. Not sure exactly what they were doing there.

Later on, we performed some bad changes from one spinnaker to another and lost quite a bit of distance. One of Ericsson, Brasil or movistar almost passed us. I am waiting for the position report right now to see what is going on and where everyone is. Our radar is pretty hopeless…can’t see another VOR 70 when it is 0.5 mile astern. Thank God the race committee is keeping us out of the ice this time.

The big picture for tonight is to get through Bass Strait, dodging several islands and to stay far enough away from Tasmania to not get too much of a wind shadow from it in the South West wind. The wind is about 20 knot from 225deg right now. The big pressure that we were supposed to see from this front hasn’t materialised.

Still now position report so I guess I will fire this off to you all and you can see when I do where everyone is. It never went.

Now it is five hours later. I haven’t slept yet on this race and now it is day time again. . Something went wrong on every maneuver we did last night so it was always necessary to have an extra guy on deck. Too many issues to list but nothing went smoothly and everything took a real long time. So we went pretty slow and lost some miles on the position report I was waiting for and I bet we lost more on the one coming up.

We have one problem that we have to resolve in order to be able to fly spinnakers. Right now we have a jib up.

That is it for now.
Paul Cayard


And sent at 06:01 today...

Finally found a bit of a groove here. We seem to have the correct sails up and our speed is good against Ericsson and ABN AMRO Two, both of whom we can see.

It is only blowing 14 knots from 205deg and we are all reaching on our big masthead reachers. The other bit of really good news is that we were able to sort out our problem with the bowsprit tack lines so no issue with being able to change from one spinnaker to another.

Last night we just could not seem to choose the correct sail for the conditions. The conditions were changing a bit on the back side of the front and we had a lot of trouble with all of out changes. Hopefully we can stay 'in phase' with the wind and execute well from now on.

Everyone in The Pearl has pushed hard in the first 24 hours, staying on deck longer than the normal four hours to give a hand to sort things out. Today we are catching up on our sleep now that we have got things settled.

The forecast is off right now on wind speed...we have less, but tonight the forecast is for the wind to increase again to 25. Basically for the new three days, the forecast is pretty much the same:17-25 knots from 200-210. That should make this a fairly fast trip, not record breaking but good.

movistar sailed real well last night, probably not changing their spinnaker at all. Changes are costly especially if you pick the wrong one so the mantra of "if it ain’t broke, don't fix it" applies here. The fleet is spread out a bit now with Brasil 20 miles north of us and Ericsson and ourselves in the south. The forecast of today doesn't show
much difference in wind between north and south. That could change.