3 burning orange balls. 2 glowing white globes. A million stars, and a whole lot of blue. That pretty much sums up our first few days on the ARC Transatlantic.
Our first sun rose and set over Gran Canaria. Then that was the last time we saw land and most of the fleet. Luckily there was more wind than predicted for the start, which was a downwind start complete with a warship committee boat -- so that was pretty cool.
Then came the moon. Nearly full and a prefect introduction for our crew's first night on Hermes. Breeze was in the mid teens, and we carried Mustang Spinny throughout the night. We had a few gybes, making almost equal heading west vs south for a bit, then we turned south for awhile while the big boat cruising fleet headed west attempting to make a 2500 NM lay line.
Apparently this confused some, as we got a radio call from a neighboring 15 m boat inquiring that we must be ocean racers and had a reason for heading south... so what was our fancy racing routing program telling us to do? We had a giggle onboard and shared our tactics with the other boat of heading south to get into stronger breeze, and that this was the best course for OUR boat. They thanked us for the info and carried on.
Day two was beautiful. Sunny and moderate conditions. The moon came out late last night, so for our early night watches the sky was a blanket of stars. This made for a very dark gybe of our black kite, but we pulled out a clean move. At one point last night we switched to the A3 as the swell was large and a few flogs of Mustang had us conservatively switching to our heavy-weight mast-head kite.
We got Mustang Spinny back up at sunrise, now with reef 1, averaging low teens and Morgen just hit 17.4 on a surf as I write this. Breeze is up to the mid 20s now, more than forecasted, but perhaps we are experiencing some coastal weather being less than 100 NM off the coast of Africa. Enjoying high speeds with Mustang, surfing on the edge!
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