Sailing in the rain, just sailing in the rain.....
09:00, 18 December 2002
by Tim Hedges

Yesterday it was all change at the front, today it is all change at the back with Glasgow and Cape Town gaining at the expense of Bristol and New York. The weather has been very squally with 180-degree wind shifts and anywhere between 3 and 30 knots of wind. It has also been wet. Very wet, and the crews are beginning to fully appreciate the meaning of the term “tropical downpour”. This is invariably a surprise to some crew who no doubt have a very different picture of sailing through the Caribbean. Still, as duty skipper Rupert Parkhouse comments, at least the decks look lovely and clean, and such a copious supply of fresh water ensures that off watch hair washing is the order of the day.

Mostly the boats are sailing under white sails at the moment, rather than spinnakers, as the wind is too far forward to allow much use of the down wind sails. The boats are also experiencing the effects of the adverse North Equatorial Current which is slowing them by around a knot, and further increasing their need to sail hard on the wind as it is pushing them in the wrong direction. The advantage is that the frequent squalls are less of a problem without spinnakers as the boats are far easier to manoeuvre quickly, and there is less danger of sail damage. The disadvantage is that the boats will need to keep their hatches closed and the interiors will soon resemble a sauna on overdrive. (In clement down wind conditions with little likelihood of spray on the decks they are able to keep some of the hatches open, and conditions on board are much pleasanter.)

Jersey and Hong Kong certainly seem to have profited from their easterly position and have, in Rupert’s words, “pulled ahead sharply” with a lead of over 20 miles on third placed Liverpool. The remaining boats are much less ‘grouped’ today, and it is hard to predict who, if anyone, will have an advantage over the next couple of days. What neither the table nor the chart show is that the boats still have to go round another way point some distance to the south east of their current position and that this is calculated in the distance to go. This explains the fact that the boats to the west such as Glasgow and New York would seem at first sight to be ahead of London or Cape Town, yet in fact have a greater distance to sail. Certainly given the localised conditions where being one side of a cloud can leave you wallowing whilst on the other another boat sails over the horizon it is still anyone’s race.

I will leave you with a small conundrum faced by a skipper who shall remain nameless. If one wears boots when it rains, and shorts when it is hot, how does one stop one’s boots filling with rain when it is hot and raining?

Tim Hedges