First news, we got the Scoring Gate! It was a long way off the rhumb line and we were pushed uncomfortably hard by Zhuhai but it all came good in the end. Congrats to James and Mike on a good, hard bit of racing and two bonus points. I think both of our light wind sails deserve a little rest.
Today was also officially “reintroduction to gybing day’ which inevitably meant two things. Firstly, that we’d wave goodbye to our sailing buddies Zhuhai who have kept us well on our toes for the past few days, but secondly that our first gybe back would probably have a bit of a hiccup involved.
When going for a gybe we like to grind down the tack line beforehand so that when you gybe, the line itself doesn’t get looped around the bowsprit. Easy enough, but herein lies the problem. Muscle memory occasionally misremembers. Everything set up and ready to go, we gybed off our close course with Zhuhai, the clew floated around the forestay as planned and then suddenly, ‘ah... [insert appropriate exclamation here]’.
Now we had a blown tack line as the tack trailed in the sky above us, knowing if we had to drop it’d cost us time, distance and frankly, sweat we didn’t have. The crew were diligently running a line through the boom to drop the kite as I looked ahead from the helm and remembered something AQP Angus had told me he’d done on YCPE when their tack line had unexpectedly tripped free in very light winds. “We just went deep and reattached the tack”, BINGO. I wasn’t sure this would work with the Code 1 in 16kts but it certainly looked a possibility. A brief shout of ‘PADDY, HELM’ and Paddy scurried back as fast as his tether could get him there and then was extremely confused to see me rush to the bow in the same fashion to start trying to grab the kite from there, all while Paddy was thinking “that’s not how we do a drop.” A quick 3m ease of the halyards and some grunt work on the spinnaker from Oli, Colin and myself and we managed to reattach the tack line and stop from dropping the kite. Finally, a hard grind on the halyards, our hourglass popped free, and we were back in business. I must say, although it was a fun change and a slightly unorthodox way of gybing, I think I’ll stick to the regular, slightly more organised way in the future. I like to think, if the Zhuhai crew were trying to figure out what happened, that this should clear it up a bit.
On the home front, it’s getting mercifully slightly cooler now as we head further north. I for one cannot wait to get some decent speed under kite in a couple of days but only time will tell if the forecast is correct.
Hooroo cobbers,
Cam, Bob and the quick-thinking Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam team