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| Arriving back in Hong Kong, 05:30, 14th April. Oh what a beautiful city! |
Piccies below in chronological order from the start, mostly my iPhone photos, a couple from Richard ("Biggus") for which thanks with link to his photo album.
LATER: couple of photos from TC, with thanks.
LATER STILL: "How was it?" asks son, mother,
et al : Well, here's the elevator version: we cracked off south of the rhumb line just outside the harbour, which strategy went fine for two days, at which point we were leading the whole fleet on corrected time.
Then, whack!-a-mole-Hole-of-holes, ended up with all sails down and drifting to Vietnam for 6 hours (others hit holes (*), but none stopped). We lost a lot of ground 55 and more miles behind
Moonblue 2, but made up some when winds came back in, then took a critical decision on evening of day three not to play catch up, but to head south again, which this time paid off with major gains to morning day 4 (it's usually a 3-day race) when we had better angles to the finish and saw MB2 on the horizon at dawn. We played catch up with them all morning in fickle then building breezes, tossing in a couple of cunning tactical tacks and passing them around noon-ish and to the finish line an hour in front. Jubilation the order of the day at the finish, for a great resurrection, on Easter's celebration of
the Resurrection...
Main weapons used: J2 (the new 3Di version) Code Zero, A1, occasional Staysail.
As TC says in the comments "it was the full range of emotions".
So, having decided for the second year running that I'm not doing another of these races, because I just can't stand the frustration of sitting on the rail drifting wind-less, of the lottery, we will in fact line up again in 2014. And maybe do the new Hainan Island races later in the year.
See also:
Subic in 99 hours.... grr
* [Of course one could reasonably ask why we hit such a hole and not others. Others did, just not the extent we did. The course was patchy and localised all over, and there was no prediction as to that particular one -- perhaps on-board GRIB files may have helped, but we didn't have them, onboard, as that's beyond my nerd-factor; we only had PredictWind, which didn't predict
that one -- predict
wind, not predict no-wind (heh!).... so for us it was just part of the lottery of this race.]
EVEN LATERER: I've put some email comments in the comment section below, with permission. I encourage your comments here on the blog rather than email chain; that way they're always easily accessible.
EVEN LATERER STILL: Catherine's
photo album: mostly people photos at the beginning of the race (4 April), and with some after start from the Club's Facebook page and screenshots of the race. Thanks to Catherine.
Click on "Read More" to see the photos...[click to enlarge each]
