Rush - Day 18- The home run!

145 miles to go and we are cruising in company with Khelios around 3 miles in front of us, first ARC boat we’ve seen since the start. All things being equal we will be finished before this time tomorrow, nice to have a daylight finish.Update on the seaweed situation- Not long after yesterday’s blog and it had got to joke quantities it cleared, just like that. We reckon it was 100 miles wide, getting progressively worse until it was basically a field and we were wading through it. All of a sudden it was gone, we did one last back down to clear the keel, engine leg and rudders and off we went, back to cruising speed.It’s been a busy day. We decided to swim the ‘BIG’ fishing lure as we figured we could refrigerate a big fish and then share with the other boats in St Lucia. So far sadly we. read more...

Rush - Day 17- Seaweed is evil....

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhh!!!A new battle has commenced, seaweed! As we get closer the seaweed is getting thicker and there is loads of it, impossible to drive round it because there is so much. As Rush has a flat bottom and it floats on the surface we have been getting it caught around the keel, the engine leg and rudders. It’s also no longer possible to use the hydrogenerator as it gets seaweed around it’s propellor. We’ve done a number of ‘back downs’. This involves dropping the spinnaker, rounding up head to wind and drifting backwards until it comes off. They work well but take time and we’ve done loads, 10 minutes later you need to do another one. What a pain, you can feel Rush being dragged back, we are loosing 1-2kn of boat speed because of it! On the positive side we have. read more...

Rush - Day 16-We’ve Escaped!!!!!!

Yesterday after 4 days if no wind the wind slightly started to pick up a little to about 6-8 knots, however still very sunny and hot causing a couple of us to get sunburnt! We caught a Tuna, a skipjack according to our fish charts about 6-8kgs, which we had for dinner with noodles cooked by Alan, after having tuna for lunch too cooked by Nia that was caught from the day before. The sunset as usual was stunning over the horizon, finally escaping the lightning from the opposite horizon that we had ben seeing for the last 3 nights! Star gazing and shooting star spotting as it got dark. Louis, Ian and Nia all spotting one each. As the sun rose this morning the wind started to pick up at bit more with a few mini squalls where we were seeing up to 17knots but quietening down around mid day to. read more...

Rush - Day 15- Whales!!

We were ghosting along at 0-3 knots boat speed last night and suddenly heard a whale blow super close. What followed was about 90 minutes of at least two, maybe more whales, probably around half Rush size swimming along with us, as close as 3m at times just keeping us company. They were close enough that when one blew we felt the spray and smelt the fishy breath! Amazing, just amazing. They were grey with a small fin, perhaps a right whale of some sort, hard to tell, it was dark and we don’t have a book onboard. In other news it’s snigglefest, day 4. We do feel like we are slowly wriggling from the grasp as we’ve had 4-7 knots of wind fairly constantly for a couple of hours and we expect a little bit more into this evening. Be interesting to see if it’s just us that got stuck this hard. read more...

Rush - Day 14- Snigglefest, day 2 and a half..

‘Sniggling’ is what Figaro sailors (or maybe just Alan) use to term how they make progress sneaking every little puff of breeze that they can when there is next to zero wind. We’ve been doing that for nearly 3 days. It means constantly helming the boat, trimming and changing the sails, pointing in every random direction where a puff of breeze will send you as long as it’s not completely the wrong way. It also means being very patient and equally frustrated. When the sails flap completely and the rig bangs around it also sometimes means dropping sails so we minimise shock loads through the rig caused by sloppy seas. Then the next puff comes and we put them back up again. We are in zero gradient breeze and have had light little puffs from 2-5knots come from all sorts of directions, that’s. read more...