Xplorer of Hamble - 24 hours from Las Palmas

So after months (years?) of planning we left Las Palmas on Sunday and started our first ARC.

Leaving the pontoon and starting was huge mixture of feelings and emotions. Excitement of course but tinged with the stress of getting underway with so many boats in a small piece of water and huge dose of emotion as I said goodbye to Val. I could barely speak for 10 minutes as we made our way out of the marina.

The pre-week in Las Palmas was also a complete mix. I and the Xplorer team (Anna, Tony and Tom) worked endlessly on provisioning the boat, checking things, fixing things, improving things and, biggest challenge of all, finding places to store everything - not least 300 litres of bottled water. We also consumed quite a lot of beer and wine! Val and her friend Kim came to see us off and good time was had by all. The highlights were the safety inspection, the fancy dress party and the Dymo machine. We passed the safety inspection first time with 99% of boxes ticked and just one small follow-up. After reading the safety regs 100 times over the last year there were really no excuses. The Flower Power fancy dress party was hilarious. We all looked pretty ridiculous but the story can’t really be told in words. The pictures will be published at a later date! The Dymo machine came on board because I asked Anna to take charge of the storage of everything and to label the lockers, floorboards etc. with the contents. Then Tom and I (mostly Tom) got hold of the machine and various misleading and often obscene words got added. And things got moved of course. It’s pretty obvious that to find the naan bread you should look in the sail repair locker... All good schoolboy humour and Anna treated us accordingly. But I’m not sure the safety inspector ever understood why we needed what was in the second drawer down on the chart table!

And the sailing? Well the weather briefings made it clear that there were two distinct choices - go west first or go south first. West looked more windy and quicker over the fist week but more doubtful later. South looked slower at first but with probably more reliable trade winds later. We went south and slow it certainly is. We managed 5-7 knots over the first 20 hours but we are now crawling along at 3 knots with hardly any wind. Our onshore route planners are telling us it will shift helpfully and pick up over the next 24 hours. We’ll see.

Anyway, we are trying making the best of it. Tony has started an 850 page Ken Follett novel. Tom was trying to fish but had to pull the line in when a school of dolphins stopped by and is now stuck on question two out of 303 questions in the GCHQ puzzle book. I am writing this. Well, we could be enjoying storm Angus.

Peter Bamford