Today we made great progress for the most part, making the most of strong tides as we rounded the island of Rathlin. By the time you read this, we will be alongside no doubt receiving the ‘LegenDerry’ welcome that has been promised.
It's been a long race and one of our poorest performances so far. We were in the lead group for the first half of the race but threw it away when we decided to cover GREAT Britain as it looked like it was heading for the Scoring Gate. It's all part of yacht racing. Sir Ben Ainslie won a gold medal at the Olympics by simply covering his main opponents’ every move and sacrificing overall placing.
Unfortunately GREAT Britain is faster than us in light winds and was able to squeeze just far north of the Azores high to pick up the new breeze first and it snowballed from there. In this race, from start to finish, the wind shifts and strengths have always favoured the leaders, there was never an opportunity for the boats behind to catch up.
We had hoped that the course extension would offer up a chance but it was a complete disaster for us, nothing went our way and we lost even more ground to those ahead thanks to unfavourable winds and currents nearly the whole way. Frustrated doesn't even come close to describing how we felt!
It just hasn't been our race...it's time to put this one behind us and concentrate on the next. I am very much looking forward to once again racing in tidal waters, it makes it much more interesting!
Thanks for following and see you on the penultimate race to Den Helder, coming soon!
A LegenDerry Garmin, out.
Ash