The race start was spectacular! I almost had a heart attack! I think there were about 115 yachts competing in the Sydney to Hobart race this year, which takes place every year on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas. The yachts range widely in size so we are up against small boats and huge, very sleek professional racing yachts. There are different classes that you actually compete against but you are all out on the water at the same time for the race start. There are three lines for the start, I would have never of known this unless they told us in the brief though because boats were everywhere!
For this race, they had the skippers wear the VIRB camera with the heart monitor activated. They really should have put the heart monitor on me if they wanted a good show! We nearly missed one boat after the race start. As we came close, the other boat's bowman literally reached out and pushed our stern away with his hands. That is how close we came to hitting them! That is when I nearly had a heart attack and started hyperventilating momentarily. Unfortunately, we were in the wrong, so we had to take a penalty of 2 tacks to right our wrong.
We ended up last out of the harbor amongst the other Clipper fleet, but started to catch up once we went downwind. We started the race with the intentions of sleeping on the rails like how all the locals do it. This means you sit on the high side, with your legs over the side and you literally sleep on the rails during your off watch. At the start, we did do this. Not the easiest way to get sleep, but you do manage to sleep some. However, a couple of watches in, shit hit the fan again, and the predicted storm finally came through. So at that point we were back below deck for sleeping since it was unsafe to stay up. This was the worst storm I've experienced yet. The only good part about this is that the wind gusts were really warm and the water spraying all over us was warm too. Since we were in the middle of the fleet at this point but still close to the boats ahead of us, we had the lucky insight of watching each boat in front of us do some kind of tack or boat movement on the AIS, so we knew the front was about to hit. We got the spinnaker down within minutes of the front hitting, so we luckily didn't have too many issues getting it down and the staysail up. Wooling the kite during that storm was quite fun in the sail locker with the boat crashing onto each wave. I went flying a few times in my seat on the floor with my whole body leaving the ground. Good thing I had sails to soften the blow on the way back down. However, later on once the worst of the storm had passed, we still had strong winds and managed to snap one of our staysail sheets. We still have the remains of the old yankee sheet that we wrapped around our propeller previously, so we used that to replace the broken staysail sheet and continued on.
The other interesting thing we realized after we left Sydney was that none of our wind instruments were working, which means we can't tell the wind angle or speed of the wind. So during that storm, we actually had no idea how strong the gusts were. The wind speed is also important to know to determine what sails to put up since each sail has a max wind speed it can handle before we blow them to smithereens. So we just had the windex to use for helming which is fine for people who know what they are doing but makes my life slightly more difficult when helming. I suppose I am learning the original way to helm now...
The last day/night, we hit yet another wind hole. Besides the fact that we should be racing, it was a beautiful day and we had flat, glossy water to look at with the sun reflecting perfectly off of it. Our watch ended up staying up later just enjoying the peaceful sailing and chatting with the other watch. When I woke for the night shift, nothing had changed, still going at 1-2 knots. Still amazingly frustrating with all the boats holed up around us and slowly progressing closer. However, the stars were bright and it was a lovely sight to see all the lights in the sky and surrounding us from the other boats. Although frustrating, it is nights like this that I will remember. We have Jack Johnson playing at the helm, but Suzanne has her own mix playing in her headphones, dancing away at the grinder in her own world...just makes me smile that we get to enjoy moments like this...again, even though we are painstakingly close to the finish!
We finally decided to put up our code 1 even though there was no wind and luckily it did the trick and got us moving again. Unfortunately, Telemed had the idea first and took off in the lead. At this point, we had merged with most of the boats so it was a neck and neck race to the finish! Telemed ended up getting away but we were able to overtake Mission Performance when they decided to switch kites and barely kept the lead minutes from the finish line when we had a gybe go wrong, but luckily for us, they blew their tack line and were not able to overtake us!
The reception in Hobart was absolutely amazing! People were everywhere cheering us in! It was such a great experience to take place in this iconic Sydney to Hobart race among 115 other boats, of which about 30 dropped out during the race due to things breaking from the storm. But we made it all the way and with our best finish yet in sixth place! We are slowly moving up the ranks and hope to claim a fifth position soon! And it should be mentioned that the winner of this race among the Clipper fleet was Wendo on DaNang, Vietnam!!! Wendo is an Australian native and this was her tenth time participating in the Sydney to Hobart race. She also won in the overall race for being the first female skipper in! Cheers to Wendo and her team for doing such a kick ass job! We were all routing for them to win!!!
The marina was packed on the way out!
So many boats!!!
A couple photos from the end of the storm
A wave completely flooding the cockpit
We may have played a sneaky game of Cards Against Humanity one night once the storm passed...
No comments:
Post a Comment