The English Breakfast I had in Mindelo this morning was good. Very very good. It had baked beans, English bacon, sausage, fried tomatoes, mushrooms and toast. The two cafe lattes complimented it perfectly. The setting was perfect too. It was at a floating bar overlooking the marina. You may have thought that this was the best part of my day, but you would be mistaken. Very much mistaken as the best part of the day occurred at exactly 0049 in the morning in pitch darkness.
6 days ago we all left Las Palmas full of anticipation and excitement. Our neighboring boat ‘Evangeline’ cruised off and we never saw her again until we were about 200nm from our destination. We are very similar boats and for the last couple of days we sailed almost parallel with each other. One would edge ahead and then the other caught up and then edged ahead. This continued until night fell as we approached the finish line with only about 5nm to go. The finish line was between a large rock/tiny island and the headland. Enough room for multiple boats to pass but not enough room to lose focus and stray off course. That would have been disastrous.
It was a race for the finish and neither boat wanted to be beaten after so long at sea with the finish line so close. As we were behind them and the wind was pushing us both downwind the only chance we had was to gas them. We had to stay directly between them and the wind direction and gas them (spill our dirty air onto their sails). They weaved to stay out of it. We changed course to cover. They changed course and we covered. This repeated every minute. 3nm to go!
A gap developed and we managed to pick up speed by surfing down waves and we edged up beside them. 2nm to go. Arghhh they are now in front. 2 minutes later and then we were nosing in front. It’s now a drag race to the line! TUI increased speed and then increased some more. We were now about 6 boat lengths ahead when disaster struck. Wind accelerated along the cliffs and the wind shifted 30 degrees and blew the boom over and we accidentally gybed. Sh!t, damn, seriously??? This had to happen now? We had stalled and lost all speed and were heading parallel to the line. Quick! Gybe back! Evangeline was only a boat length behind us and going a lot faster. Speed, give me speed. We were back in the race, and on course and tried to bisect the line giving us a shorter distance. We started picking up speed again. We kept building speed and we started to put some distance on Evangeline.
At exactly 0049 UTC we crossed the finish line one minute ahead of the other boat after sailing almost 900nm
My English Breakfast tasted pretty good that morning but at 0049 the race finish tasted better.
We ended up finishing about position 30 overall and 7th place in our division.
Good morning Mindelo!
