Race completion

Wednesday, June 25 +15 sec into Thursday

Finished, at last

We sailed in sparse winds from the SE through Tuesday night and into Wednesday, always on a port tack and getting further and further south and edging west, too. Tacking would have meant heading back to New England.

Wednesday morning, the 5 kt. wind fell to zero, and within a minute, switched 100 degrees to the SW, exactly as the downloaded grib files had predicted, although rather late for our purposes as far as the race went.  So, 90 miles west of Bermuday, we reached in on starboard with spinnaker flying the entire time in a 7-9 knot breeze that, while not swift, was a wonderful respite from what we had experienced. 

We held the spinnaker reach all the way to Northeast Breakers where we had to douse it to head closer to the wind. We had to tack several times to get to the finish line which eventually we did at 15 seconds after midnight. 

During the entire voyage, Peter seemed never to become discouraged, and always did at least his share of the work and took his share of the watches. In fact, he took more than his share.

On the way in, we answered a distress call from another double hander, Sirena Bella.  She had lost her engine and were concerned enough that they anchored off Kitchen Shoals to prevent drifting into the rocks.  We promised them that we would return on our race completion to tow them into Hamilton.  Only several miles to the finish, it took us a couple hours before we could get back to them by which time they had resourcefully cleared the fuel lines and were restarted.  They followed us into Hamilton to be sure help was available should the engine fail again.  It did not.

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