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So. A much faster race than expected. We finished in 2 days, 4 1/2 hours, yesterday afternoon.
Monday night, we crossed from north to south of the rhumb line following the wind, but in hindsight, it appears that everyone had the same wind and the only thing we gained was distance travelled. Steady winds of 15 to 20 kts mostly from the south. Then by Tuesday morning, as the wind backed into the SW, it also picked up to about 25 kts.
Were able to fly the assym for part of Tuesday during a relative lull in the wind but after a couple hours, the wind escalated forcing us to snuff the spinnaker and go with the jib on same side as main and mizzen sails. At the longitude of Brazil Rock (although we had stood off a fair distance to the south in search of more wind. As we turned left to parallel the Nova Scotia coast, and as the wind backed we were going almost dead down wind with the jib poled out to windward on the spinnaker pole
That maneuver was a great success with speed through the water consistently in the 8 to 9.5 kts with boat speeds up to 10.6 surfing down the building seas of 6 to 8 feet. Quite thrilling, actually. We had favorable current giving us speeds across the ground of up to 12.6 kts.
But a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the forum: the adjustable back stay suddenly gave way about 4 inches and while pumping it up back to its desired tension, the boat and waves had their way with me and we went from a course of 0600 to 1100, the jib back winded, the pole swung back to the side stays and when I was back on course, I watched as the pole broke in slow motion. First it bent, then meiosed into two daughter poles, one 4 feet long and the other 14 feet long. The wind was screaming in the rigging, we almost broached, and at the end, had two very sharp ends of the pole jumping this way and that trying to find and shred the jib. Peter quickly and successfully got the pole down on the deck and there were no injuries to either crew or boat.
But it meant that we had to go downwind with jib flogging and blanketed by the main. So, we had to jibe back and forth to get into the harbor with all three sails still working. We were off the wind about 300 to one side then the other when we wanted to go straight in to the controlling course marks. We lost time, although we were still pushing through the water at over 7 kts.
The long course up the harbor to the finish was exciting with a race between us and another boat, the wind now off the port beam and increasing suddenly to about 30 kts. Were able to reef the main sail with no diminution in boat speed, and we inched ahead of the other boat, a distance separating us of about 100 yards all the way to the finish.
Even with the slowest handicap in the double handed fleet, we still only finished ahead of one boat on corrected time. But our average speed for the entire race was over 6.8 kts based on a rhumb line distance of 360 nm. Since our actual distance travelled was longer, we had an actual average boat speed of 7.6 kts. I could not have dreamed of going that fast in our boat.
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