Offbeat -

The forecast is looking good for a quick passage down the coast and nothing too excessive in the wind or sea state to deal with. We are all excited for the event to start...... Follow us on our blog... https://sailingoffbeat.com/2023/11/04/ready-for-the-off/. read more...

Offbeat - Weed and Candlelit dinner at sea

It feels as if we are now in the final stretch, it’s 0200 at the moment on Sunday morning, we have just under 300 miles to go and the beautiful Nika has crossed the line a little earlier this evening. We should finish on Monday. Today we had chafe in our spinnaker halliard again, it took about an hour to sort out and we’ve run out of rope to shorten it. If it goes again, we’ve run out of options and will finish on main and jib only. Next time (!) we’ll have to find a way to have two halliards. We’ve now got a small list of potential improvements for the boat, even though we were well prepared.We are looking forward to our first rum punch ashore but I doubt we’ll be able to eat much better than in our restaurant on board. On Friday we realised we were seeing increased amounts of Sargasso. read more...

Offbeat - Night sailing mind games

It’s dawn on Thursday, another 12 hours of night sailing behind us and for almost the first one that’s been uninterrupted by sail changes, course changes or equipment failures. Strangely this doesn’t mean that sleep has been any less disturbed, night sailing plays tricks with the mind, especially when sailing fast downwind. We’ve actually had the steadiest weather conditions of the whole rally, 18/19 knots all night, occasionally increasing to 22kts and sometimes dropping to 16. We’ve been sailing at an average of 8-9kts boat speed all night (the tracker will show slightly less as we aren’t going directly to St Lucia and the speed shown is the component in that direction. Offbeat revels in these conditions, stable and fast. However the boat is full of noises which play. read more...

Offbeat - Lines out all day. Result .... two fish!

Sunrise yesterday saw a beautiful blue sky and 12-14 kts of wind. We’d overnight sailed on reefed main and jib so decided to try our spinnaker again. Of course the wind immediately increased to 18kts plus, very rapid sailing on aNautitech Open 46; we set a new all-time boat speed record 16.7kts surfing down a large wave but after an hour decided that hand steering all day would get in the way of our relaxing cruise. We reverted to our downwind sail. Plenty of exercise before 1000 on a Wednesday morning.We then decided to take up the most English of pastimes...fishing. We had the line out all day and as I write this at 0745 Thursday morning I can report that we’ve caught two fish. Any other ARC+ boats have more??? Please note in comments below..Only trouble is that neither were Tuna, just. read more...

Offbeat - A busy couple of nights....

On Offbeat, we had a good run with our pink spinnaker away from Gran Canaria and, along with a few of the faster monohulls, were first to pick up the stronger breeze between the islands.As the sunset we decided to switch to our new downwind running sail which furls on a cable and is both more stable than a spinnaker so needs less attention from the crew and is also easier to handle if we need to take it down at night. It turns out it’s also a bit faster when heading straight downwind.We had our first cooked meal on board, pasta with sun dried tomatoes and pine kernels, washed down with a can of bitter shandy, the went into our watch system for the night. We had agreed to have 2 people on watch at all times for the first night whilst there were lots of other boats around, in 4 hour. read more...