Photos credi to Steve and Chris Rawlinson, onboard SV Scott Free. They detoured to meet Sheer tenacity mid Pacific to get these pics, and emailed them immediately (a few hours ago) to me via their Satphone, with some unbelievable compression software. The pics are 12k each! These are pretty much "live" from mid-pacific!!
Hi Guys,
As I
said , we had a flying finish to
yesterdays noon to noon days run, and it did not come to a sudden stop either!! We continued to make good progress,
and the seas did flatten out in time for sundowners ! We decided to stick with
the 2 reefs during the night, as neither of us felt like reefing heroics in the
dark, after being close to our own safety limits the previous night! Besides,
we were on a broad reach, and we could use both headsails to the full, with the
double reefed main. Thw wind dropped a little during the night, and also backed
a little , making it more of a down wind run than "Sheer"
appreciates. Our sailing buddies on" Scott-Free', Chris and Steve, have a
wing keeled Contest 43, thrive on down
wind sailing, and we found ourselves some 5 or 6 miles behind them at day
break. With the wind down to 12-13, it was time to give our recut Asymetric a
run. When we flew back to RSA in January, we took it back to Quantum for a
recut, as it was simply too big for the boat. Being an RSA flag design, we
thought the chances of Jannie being able to cut it down, by 2 meters, still get
it to fly , and look half decent, might be something of a challenge. As a
guideline, I said ,make it fly first, and dont worry too much about matching up
all the stripes! Well.they did a supurb job ! The recut sail was shipped back
to us in Panama, together with the new genoa we had ordered. We put it up, and it set
beautifully... for about 5 minutes, before the quick release Wichard clip decided
to try itself out, un invited! Take 2, had us picking up speed to an impressive
7-8 knots in the light breeze. We started to recover the ground we had lost to
Scott Free during the night, and so began another of our fabulous sailing
challenges. Steve saw it as a great mid ocean photographic opportunity, and
changed course to meet us at close range , to take some unusual photos of Sheer
Tenacity, flying her Asymetric, in mid Paciic!
Of course, the wind then filled in getting up to 19-20 knots, which made
Steves approach quite a challenge, as by moving from his down wind angle, he
got onto a reach, and was approaching at about 9.0 knots ! He got Scott Free
into the right position, and took a bunch of still pics and video footage....
one of which you will have the privaledge of seeing before we can! ( More about
that later!) The wind was now
pushing 20 knots, and had veered bach to SE, so the sensible thing was to drop
the bag, and go back to the genoa. This time the Wichard Quick release worked when
it was supposed to, and Steve has got that on film too!In all this excitement,
we lost track of time, and found it was 12.40, and we had missed our 12.00noon
log update. We did it immediately, at 12.40, and Mary recorded our speed as
9.3knots! The days run, (including the extra 40 minutes) , turned out to be
181miles for Day 5.... Not too Shabby ! We have now done a a quarter of the
journey (730), with 2180 miles to go!
Back to
the photo ! Steve has some very good compression software on his satcoms, and
will be sending one or two of the
pictures he took , to Justin, to post on the HBYC and Sheer Tenacity blog sites. He might put a few more on to their
own Scott Free blog site, which he might ( or might not!) give to Justin, for
other cruisers to follow!
Regards to you
all, and just remember our plagiarised new motto! "Adventure before
Dementia !!!"
Rod
& Mary , per satphone.
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