After four years of trying.....

Andraž Mihelin, one half of the Adria Mobil team provides insight into life on board a Mini

The meteo briefing with our router Jure Jerman on the morning just before the start of this 2,500 miles long singlehanded two stage race made us quite nervous. The latest GRIBs that arrived a few minutes previously suggested a route that would first take you more than 100 miles north of the rhumb line and later, after Cape Finistere, more than 100 miles south. On board our Minis, where we are only allowed to receive general weather information through an SSB radio receiver this sounded far too risky, since we tend to be shy of playing the weather, the winning tactic usually being - stick to rhumb line and play the shifts.

The Nautical Club of Les Sables d`Olonne mounted a really good effort to revive this classic race, last held 12 years ago on the route Vannes-Azores-Vannes. Although this being the smaller, less glamourus sister to the Mini Transat itself, the spirit surrounding the race was similiarly excellent with dedicated volunteers, good organisation, 70 competitors and a city, home of the Vendee Globe, where you have sailing magazines and pictures of Open 60s even at the hairdressers. This created a very unique and exciting atmosphere.

For me and my team mate Kristian Hajnsek on Adria Mobil 509 this is our fourth year on the Mini circuit and our two boats are finaly out of puberty. After doing the Mini Transat last year, we realised that we had learned too many things the hard way and that we would really like continue sailing in a class that is so alive and where the level of competition is growing insanely every year - the original Mini spirit is still there but the level is rising rapidly. Big sponsors, professional sailors, shore crew, training camps and an incredible number of competing boats - in last two years Classe Mini registered 150 new boats, coming to the number 650, allocated to Jean Marie Vidal, the French sailing legend from the South of France.

A few hours after start, held in the middle of a rain shower, we were facing two tactical choices: Going north to meet an approaching cold front and be first to benefit from the shift, or play it safe and go for the Southern option. Soon it became obvious (as is increasingly the way) that all the main favorites had had the same routing advice and I found myself in company of Ecover, Bretain Lapins, Areas and others beating to the northwest in a light westerly wind awaiting the incoming cold front.

Around sunset the rock`n`roll started and before midnight I found myself on the bow, reefing my jib in 35 knots of wind. I almost forgot how wet and uncomfortable that operation is. When you add to that the seasickness that visited me in the beginning of the night my brains were making some serious plans how to find an excuse to abandon the race and turn in to one of the nearby Breton ports. But that of course was just a small unconcious part of my brain. The one I could control was waiting for the forecasted wind shift that finally came early in the morning. So there we tacked - first the water ballast, the daggerboard, restacking, then the swing the keel, put on the new backstay and finally the sheets. After that I was half dead. I put on my autopilot and went below deck for a quick nap.



At that point I was in the lead and had a perfect position to close in to Cap Finistere. Everything on board was okay. Except for having to climb the mast to retrieve a renegade halyard, I could really focus on the second weather system which was waiting for us after Finistere.

The Azores high was positioned well to the northwest and was surrounded by three lows. The question remained - how far south do you dare to go after leaving the Bay of Biscay. I decided for a relatively safe southerly option, and this allowed Adrien Hardy on Brossard to dive deeper south and benefit from stronger winds in that sector. Peter Lauressyns on Ecover, with whom we were swapped the lead with for the last 24 hours suffered damage to his kick up rudder system and had to slow down dramatically so the pressure was off temporarily.

The next two days were pure joy: 20 knots of wind from 100 degres apparent are almost ideal conditions for our crazy machines. The first 12 hours ended up with us sailing 138 miles!!! Water everywhere and boat was simply flying between the waves. The pace continued for the rest of the day and well into next day. Later on our ARGOS tracking beacon confirmed we had covered 247 miles in 24 hours, toped only by an incredible 260 miles by Adrien Hardy on Brossard - remember our boats are only 21ft long...

After that the wind backed and turned the race into a dead downwind run to the finish. In expectation of a southerly shift I kept to the north of the rhumb line which proved to be wrong, since the shift never came. 300 miles before the finish, we crossed tacks with Brossard which was the first boat I had seen since Finistere. Neither Adrien nor myself had been able to catch the daily skeds on our SSB radios so most of our conversations turned to speculating about our position.

The passage through the Azores archipelago was unusually simple since the wind was blowing parallel to the rhumb line and therefore not creating big windshadows typical for that area. Finally the fat lady sang in the morning on the seventh day of sailing and we finished a good hour behind Brossard and just under an hour in front of Fabien Despres on Soitec.

In our project Adria4ocean, with one Adria 510 second and Adria 509 on seventh place we are happy to see that we are not just keeping the pace with the best but are also slowly catching up on competition. At the same time we are not forgetting that it is still just hal ftime and the time differences are ridiculously small between the leaders. We are both looking forward for the way back and hopefully having some more good news for our campaign.