Royan, 14 July 2010
This time your roving reporter was actually on-board (the last report written by me was based on extensive research and interviews of the crew actually sailing..). The crew for the offshore was shaken but not stirred, Our Famous French Skipper was responsible for tactics and navigation, our favourite froggy Alex was driving the boat. Rob on the bow, Thijs in the pit (and secondary driver), Anton on Spinnaker, Mijke on Jib and myself on the main.
The Tour de France organisation decided all this fooling around in Talmont took way to much time and decided to start the offshore 24 hours earlier (the actual reason is a depression above Ireland which wreaks havoc in the Netherlands, and is expected to deliver 3 meter high swells and a lot of wind in Talmont, limiting the access and departure of the harbour).
Our dockstart was pretty ok, we are still a bit chaotic in the kitchen (bas left a huge gap, especially in quality, volumes and planning …. that is more or less everything). We started sailing in a 10 knots breeze: The course was fairly simple, a short (1 mile) upwind beat, a 50 miles long jib/spi reach to the entry of "la Gironde", with a small (10 mile) downwind leg to Royan.
The start was pretty much ok, we were a bit late of the line and the boatspeed wasn't 'perfect', we ended up in 10th place at the first upwind mark, just behind the Omani's . Laurent decided to sail directly to the mark, while the rest was led a few degrees higher by Saint Malo. During the leg positions of the bottom group and top group shifted a few times, we were leading the lower group, and our bearings to Saint Malo shifted to both advantageous to us (putting us in the front of the fleet) and to them, placing us around 10th place.
Eventually the pressure started dying completely, but we were able to maintain speed directly to the mark on our masthead spinnaker. We rounded the mark at the end of La Gironde (La Gironde is an estuary from the river "Gironde", connecting Bordeaux to the Atlantic) in third position but some rusty boat-handling stopped the boat completely, leaving us parked below a couple of boats, the consequence was that we had to jibe a few times: costing us several places.
In the last part the wind died completely, letting the current pushing us into the estuary further. The first boats only crossed the line 10 minutes before us, within 10 seconds of each other, but we were not able to maintain our 3rd place at the gibe mark: we eventually finished 17th.
Today it was all about relaxing, catching up sleep and chill'n. Tomorrow at 7.30 we have a new dockstart for the inshores in Royan, but Gerrit's precense will make sure that we will be ready to race with plenty of time to spare!
Signing off, Ties
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