Nightlife - Nearly time to go !

This last day in las palmas has been a busy one for all of us, with Dave and Dan chasing down gas , Tim and I cleaning and rigging the boat, the skippers breifing for Tom and Dave, and stowing and lashing going on apace. The boat is now cleared for action, as Nelson might say. We spent an hour this morning chatting through the various issues relating to the boat, and another hour and half this afternoon going through the safety briefing , getting a note of important procedures, like rigging checks, and generally getting in to idea of sailing. I have not set foot on a yacht since the fastnet, and I am still finding it hard to believe that I am actually here and ready to go. The day after the fastnet, having survived the whole race without injury, I fell down the stairs at home, and tore. read more...

Nightlife - On our way at last!

After many day's hard work (many weeks for some), we're finally on our way. We just left our marina berth and have motored out of the habour on our way to the start line in time for the 12:40 race start.There was a real atmosphere of nervous excitement in the marina as we left with around 240 boats that are participating in the ARC doing their final checks and saying their goodbyes to the other neighbouring boat crews. Only a subset of the 240 yachts in the event are actually part of the official race, and as one of these we left the harbour gate first, with a number of people waving us and taking photographs. Even if I do say so myself, we look a resplendant crew in our matching 'Nightlife'polo shirts.At the moment, the wind is fairly light and indeterminate. Motoring out, we noticed. read more...

Nightlife - We're off!

27d47.034N 015d20.832WWe enjoyed a good start at the committee boat end of the line having been the first boat to hoist the kite.As expected, the big boats, which are much faster, soon got ahead of us. We were pleased to note that we were able to stay ahead of a few boats that shoud have been faster, however!We are racing on handicap, for those not familiar with our sport. Larger boats are faster, according to the laws of physics, so in order to race against faster boats we get a handicap rating. Our handicap rating tells us that we are the slowest-but-one boat in this fleet. A boat's elapsed time is multiplied by it's rating allowance to give a Corrected Time. The winners are judged on the corrected time.The picture shows the 200-boat cruising fleet behind us. Now we're nearing the. read more...

Nightlife - Monday at the office

26d33.070N 018d00.020WYesterday evening there were yelps of delight when a school of dolphins surrounded the boat. Rob was off-watch too at the time and I was tempted to wake him as he had not seen them before. In fact he saw some later, jumping out of waves in the evening. Ah dolphin,shmolfin, theres plenty more fish in the sea.... Steering last night was rather interesting as we had a biggish sea coming over the quarter as we ran downwind with the genoa poled out. There were about 10 other yachts around us at one a.m. This morning I woke to the cheerful sound of he skipper saying "Let the f...... thing run free !"and protests from Dan that "it" was uncleated and free to run, then words about fingers and an almighty clunk. I deduced from this the pole had been reset successfully, and. read more...

Nightlife - Nightfall Approaches

So we make a series of checks around the boat to make sure she's properly settled down for the night. Rigging check, ensure battery charged, double-check forecast against sail plan since we'd prefer if we can to have sails up that will see us through the night with a minimum of changes and of course meanwhile, Dan is preparing our evening meal (see photo). Looking forward to the roast veg, Dan!Tonight we anticipate slightly less wind, so are leaving the heavy kite up with the snuffer attached. Whilst we're racing and have six on board only three of us will be on watch at any given time. While we can always call up the sleepining off-watch it's something not to be done lightly, as crew that are still dozy from their slumbers are likely to make more mistakes and be unsteady on their feet. read more...