What a ride! Spinnakers are great, and the boat really feels alive when it’s ripping along surfing the swell.
They are however fickle things that with a moment's intention can cause all sorts of trouble. So far, we have had one kite wrap itself around the forestay. Thanks to some quick intervention, we managed to get it untwisted and back flying without having to drop and repack. Only for the same kite to decide it wanted to look like an hourglass and do a wind turbine impression. This required us to drop the sail so we could untwist.
All this excitement means that we have got the spinnaker drop and hoist down to six minutes (the first one we did was about 30). Our sail repair team (Tom, Zina and Bartosz) got the sewing machine out to conduct some emergency repairs on our unfortunate Code 3. No easy task on a boat that is continually changing angle.
Now we are making our way south down the African cost. And I’m trying to decide on the best plan to catch the leading boats. The smell of fresh baked bread is proving very distracting, however.
Dan, Laura and the UNICEF team