The previous three posts below were from onboard Xena. I had another two posts from onboard which seem not to have made it through. Now I'm at the Subic Bay Yacht Club coffee shop, blogging this.
The last of them, from onboard, said "we are chasing Moonblue 2"...
The first sked on Day One had us doing well down the course and ditto for the skeds on Day two. Indeed on Day Two, we were leading the whole fleet on corrected time.
Then came the hole. All yachts this year hit a hole or soft air. But none hit the mother of all holes that we did: one that had us with all sails lowered as we drifted in the current: three times no less: all sails down for a total of six hours, night drifting, sail-less, spotlight fishing for squid off the back.
Result: on Day Three we were 55 miles back from our division, having been first in the whole fleet, the day before. That hurts.
When we got our sked on the evening of Day Two, we saw that we were still playing catch-up, so the choice was to continue chasing, or to make a radical move south, to get some separation from our division and hope to get some better angles into Subic.
And that's we decided to do: the radical move south. A brilliant tactical call by Stevo and TC,
On the morning of Day Three we'd made some major gains -- doing double the distance of our competition in 14 hours -- pointing straight at Subic.
On the dawn on Day Four, we saw a sail on the horizon in front of us.
Moonblue 2, we thought, in our division. And so the chase began. Winds were light to almost zero. At times with zero boat speed, we had the crew out on the leeward rail (if "leeward" means anything in zero air. More like where the wind was trying to come from). Combination of leaning out and current, gave us some apparent wind and some boat speed to make gains on Moonblue. The wind freshened, and we made steady gains, until we could see the whites of their eyes. Steady gains brought us right up behind them, a gust of fresh air and we tacked away to get inside them and the finish, another beauty from Stevo and TC, till we were clear in front and covering their moves to the finish line.
Fresh breezes to the north point of the bay into Subic, now covering Moonblue behind us, change to Code Zero, then to A1 Spinnaker. Wind knocks took us into a bay, could have been embayed, but managed to just lift out round the point, when the wind headed, and shift to J2 jib. Tack tack tack to the finish an hour or so in front of Moonblue 2 and first across the line in our division. That meant a definite second on corrected, perhaps first, depending on the finish time of Clove Hitch. They came in about four hours later, for a win on corrected.
The cheers we had at the finish was for a remarkable comeback after losing six hours and many miles in the hole of holes.
Easter Sunday is a day or resurrection and we felt we'd been resurrected. Tremendous feeling of accomplishment in the crew.
Strompfy, who's done 22 of these races, said that this was the worst and most unusual in terms of the wind. Last time we did it in 76 hours, so this time a full 23 hours more...
Many times, sitting on the rail, I swore to myself that I'd never do this race again. There's just too much chance of the slow and frustrating times outweighing the fine sailing ones.
But one forgets the bad times and recalls the good. Zipping Code Zero reaches. Cracking runs under spinnaker in the moonlight, Venus and Jupiter gleaming bright in the west. The pleasure of fine teamwork; of hunting down the foe.
So, who knows...
