Bagheera - Where's Wally???

The Bagheera team rise at the crack of dawn on the 22nd November full of anticipation and pre-race tremors, only to find that all the previous days of long working hours have left us with little to do but sit and relax until we get underway – never good for the nerves…. Our departure time of 10.15am arrives and we leave our berth and the marina with a great send off from our fuel quay friends with The Monkey Song from the Jungle Book blaring. We all promptly agree that we will adopt it as our new theme song! Out on the water Team Bagheera decides that we should probably try and find out how the kite works. Yes folks, we really are a proper racing team!! None the less the bag goes up and then down just as fast with little to show for our efforts apart from finding out that the sail is. read more...

Bagheera - An Engineers Guide to Sailing.

Well it's been a wee while since we last reported in, aside from the Yellow Bricks fastidious hourly reports on lat and long, but it's now definitely the final run for St Lucia.So what's been going on in the world of team Bagheera? After some long watches, Captain Simon and Mate Peter finally felt that their misfits were suitably capable of flying the big rag again so up she went and it was game on. The deep running Stay Calm had better watch out! Or so we thought but after some good days sailing we had a sneaky little lesson on the art of race sailing by Tom and Simon, who not only managed to engineer a Broach but slipped in an informative Crash Jibe on the back of it to complete the curriculum! It was a very good reminder to all us amateurs that we were not quite at the Dennis Conner. read more...

Bagheera - The one that got away

Where were you on the 1st? If it wasn't at the Bagheera Gala Christmas dinner then you missed the hottest invite in the Atlantic.All the who's who made it out for what was a roaring success. There was a little bit of embarrassment when all the guests arrived on the red carpet to find that they had all been fitted by the same designer - green Bagheera t-shirt and grey shorts, but the show went on and everyone agrees it was a stupendous success.Well that's how we bought in the month of December, with a delicious Christmas turkey and an almost flat calm day on the pond. Yes, the winds had dropped right off and we were now meandering along at a sedate 9 knots. The saving grace was that it was slowly swinging around to the north and it did mean that we finally had a chance to rig up the. read more...

Bagheera - ARC Blogs

Breakfast of ChampionsThe penultimate day of the ARC 09 arrived with Bagheera slipping ever northward, our tack once again forcing us higher than we would of wished. More miles keep clocking up but alas in the wrong direction. We have really put some daylight between us and the good ship Stay Calm however, who seem to have lost the breeze as they are even further north than us.Our new number one enemy is the angry yellow V60, Big One, who are steadily reeling us in from the south. We keep pushing hard hoping for a breeze out of the North so we can get the push down straight into St Lucia. It never quite arrives but eventually we make the decision that we will have to head south or we will end up in Antigua. It is on this tack at about 1530 that the Big One pops up on the horizon off our. read more...