Nice to try out the podium as well, with our 3rd place finish

The Mistral is hard to forecast, at least west of Mallorca, and kicked in much later than forecast and stayed for a shorter time. None of the weather models we looked at for this race was close to the reality, and surely the other navigators will have scratched their heads as much as myself over this. So we chose to sail for the expected changes in the big picture (a high pressure system would move south over us), and what we could see. In the end one model seemed to resolve the situation better than the others, but I will keep that quiet in case the race start will be in similar conditions.

After Ibiza the right shift arrived as expected – with force. In the black night we were auto-tacked by the sudden 90-degrees shift, and ended up with the keel and stack still on the old side, heeled over nicely to 90 degrees until we got it all sorted. A good thing to experience this now and not during the race, damaging one sail and having us limping for a good while afterwards. This probably cost us the miles we were lacking to get in touch with the fleet again by Palma, we were about five miles behind Groupama and Abu Dhabi by Palma.

Our track as displayed by Deckman software, with wind vectors representing wind speed and direction. Northerly breeze sailing to Palma and finally southerly sailing back to the finish in Alicante

Leaving Palma and in the middle of the emergency steering drill, the breeze vanished and the fleet were parking randomly. Some boats seemed to have a clear strategy to sail north of Ibiza again, maybe due to one of the models predicting a northerly push there. We preferred to keep the boat moving in the right direction and keeping the options open for as long as possible, and ended up picking the gap between Ibiza and Formentura again. The more inshore oriented sailors onboard (no offence) complained about the sea state as we were really drifting for most the day in a funny swell, good practice for the race where we will see this several times.

Finally as we were south of Ibiza the breeze filled in from the south west where we were positioned behind Telefonica and Puma. From there on there were no real opportunities, we all sailed into the dying land breeze so the distances just increased. The northerly group finished several hours after us when the sea breeze filled in, except from Abu Dhabi who motored home and will have to complete their qualifier later! I heard a rumor that Puma never did their emergency rudder drill, so they might also have another go J

All in all good practice for us and a good result, nice for the team after all the hard work to get to where we are.

**Mistral is a strong wind from the Alps that strike the Mediterranean quite often. It is normally started by a high pressure in the Bay of Biscay bringing cold air over the mountains. You can read more about it here

**Rhumb line is the direct line between two waypoints.