Fastnet ready?

Fastnet Race is coming up quickly, and it still feels like we got together yesterday. Have been head down all the time since I got here to get my area sorted and ready to sail and measure performance, so strategy and weather work has had to wait. But Fastnet is a great deadline for us to have everything ready. We might not get it all done before the race, but it will become quite apparent during the race what we are missing.

Richard Mason arrived today so it will even be his first time onboard, should be a good experience but he is really only a few sailing days behind the rest of us.

Mike “Lowlife” Quilter is keeping an eye on the weather for me while I am trying to make everything ready for the race, and he says that we will have a moderate upwind start and then reaching back and forth from Land’s End, the exit of the English Channel, to Fastnet Rock. It really looks like a bit of everything, even some heavy beam reaching in 30 knots breeze in a cold front, which will be a good test. We have no pressure on us, the other boats that have spent time sailing should look slick, but we will try to stay in touch.

Tonight, the night before the start, I had a good incentive to improve my weather/strategy system, so I spent a few hours to do some really nice updates that we should benefit from in the early stages of the race. I should probably have been running routes instead, but the big picture looks quite settled and we will be boat on boat from the start, looking for favorable current and breeze on the water. When we put that system together with the performance data we will gather over the next month, we should have a system for navigation / weather / performance half a step further than what I used during the last VOR, and I doubt that anyone else will be any further. Really interesting work!

The race will of course be a good test for all systems, and I doubt we will get through it without issues. It is for example the first time I am running the satellite communications system on the water, we just got it all working together today.

Enough for now, time to pack my bag and get a decent sleep before tomorrow, even have a few jobs to do in the morning. Will try to keep you posted during the race, as much as possible.