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From: (no name) (no email)
Date: Fri Jun 03 2005 - 16:09:35 EDT
On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 22:48, David O' wrote:
> It does most excellently, and sounds like you made a happy choice of
> vessel and gear. How would you rate Zazen's "performance" in the ARC,
> amongst an admittedly wildly varying fleet and crew abilities?
Ahh,
You are indeed a cruel man, the ARC was one of the lowpoints of my life but a
(longish) tale worth telling. You can make your own assessment of performance
at the end :-)
We started from Gran Canaria and I was told "don;t go near all those boats" -
but thats the start line "I don;t care". OK so we started near the back, put
up the code zero and were near the front by the South end of the Island when
the few boats ahead were laid flat. Ahh that will be the front that they said
would come nowhere near us in order that everyone would start and provide a
nice spectacle. Sadly didn;t get the code zero away in time and shredded it.
That didn;t matter much as it blew like stink all night but in the morning we
looked around and could see the kevlar sails of the big racing monos on
various horizons. Then it went light - no light sail no longer.
I had been advised to go South. I took the rhumb line as I fancied something
more on the beam than from dead behind. Wrong move big time. 2 days later and
suddenly the seas were huge and during the afternoon radio sched this guy
about 45 miles North of us calls in to say his brother has gone off the back,
is being dragged along and and its his brother who is the sailor. Zazen is
surfing nicely down these huge waves hitting 20 knots at time but the
autopilot it too hot to touch (no really, too hot to touch), the crew are all
pretty shaken by news of the guys death and fear worse weather might be
heading our way and suggest we might slow down and let it pass. So out with
the drogue and the world is a different (though still eerie) place. We did a
day and a half averaging about 2 knots with drogue and wingmast alone. Not
good for the average but safe and comfortable. (Oh yes 2 drogues actually, we
lost the first one when the rode parted and I had to make a second)
Then we have a few more light days with no light sails except this huge spi
which is a bit big to carry at night.
Then we get in the trades and discover that our 70 something crewman's
cataracts are a bit worse than we thought and he cannot see the squalls
coming, Good as we are getting 3 or 4 big ones a day. Decide it might be best
to be a tad more conservative and be alive at the end.
We arrived around a day behind the TRT1200 Sister Skrit (there was _nothing_
inside that boat just a few nets on the bulkheads) crewed by 4 young
scandanavians so in the end I wasn;t unduly upset but was still pretty cross
with myself. On the other hand we were fairly well rested for a crew of 3
(not counting the kids) after 18 days (I think it was). Oh and we did not use
a drop of diesel. Oh and the only breakage was the code 0 from day 1.
Of course the nice ARC people unpolitely snipped off the overall placings of
the multihulls with scissors so we never knew where we ended up overall and
if that was their attitude could not be bothered anyway. I would probably not
bother with the ARC a second time.
The correct thing to have done was forget the main, use wing and wing jibs of
varying sizes according to conditions. We tried this later on and it was easy
and fast. Not maximally fast but overall you do more miles as you can keep up
a more optimal sailplan without fear. Brigand did this and went South and
caught some _huge_ fish and still came in days ahead of us despite being on
paper a "slower" boat.
It was a different story across the Pacific. It was lighter, we knew the boat
better and had a plan, but there were few directly comparable "times"
Hope this shed a little light.
Gary
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