Cowes - La Rochelle - Stiff wind and congratulations to both winners
Cowes - La Rochelle, Act 1: start and first night
Our conclusion : we lacked some preparation and two crew members. Everybody's fine, feeling better than during the night of the 10th to the 11th of August. On this hell of a night, we got up to 40 knots. Of head winds. In a 2 to 3 meter swell getting real nasty because of the ingoing stream in the English Channel. With two seasick crew members right from the start, your watch can feel veeery long. Feeling kind of worn-out after your watch, long hours struggling to go to sleep just before the stern hits the next wave.Here you go, more seasick crew ! Only years of experience seem to ward it off, as Pascal says.
Well, we knew we would have a hard first night! During the safety parade, nice and flat in the Solent, under trysail and storm jib, The Ewe was going 5 knots!
The race starts at 4 pm on Sunday the 11th of August. We leave for 450 miles with two reefs and the ORC jib on, our smallest before the storm jib. Even the most optimistic weather forecasts say we'll get more than 30knots for three days, sometimes up to 50, and a six meter swell in Armen pass. Going out of the Solent we feel fantastic, close hauled on flat waters, at first against then along with the tide, while Beken of Cowes keep shooting pictures of us from their zodiac.
Next to the Needles, the Ewe beats up along the sandbanks to stay in the stream. We depend on what the sounder tells us for the decision to head back towards Wight on the starboard tack, but also on our fearful assessment of the supertanker-sized waves breaking on the sandbanks.
We are only four to run the watches so time flows past slowly. The captain stays up clutching the steering wheel for a pretty number of hours. FOXY F'EWE flies, doing six knots, on a close reach on a difficult sea. She is amazingly easy to steer and quick to react even with dinghy sails on. We're making some good speed. The speedo gives us 6.5 knots when we manage to steer our way clear through those doubledecker waves breaking all around us. The Ewe is happy, she dances ahead. It's such a delight to be at the wheel (you wouldn't say that of the other posts/stations then!).
But in the cockpit, it's quite another story: it's underwater, a bit cold and there's some mihgty puking going on here ... and there too. Quite the doomsday sight. Quick, I have another cereal bar snack ... the wind goes down one notch, (on renvoie un ris), double-handed, that's a lark! Lili is back up, the day breaks. We set another reef. We feel half dead now. I go back to sleep after spending some time navigating and throwing up on the railing, again.We'll have to tack in half an hour or we'll be too far in inside the bay. We really think about stopping now after looking at the crew's faces and that's without having seen any of Pierrem and Nico yet, who are supposed to take the morning watch.
Eventually we do the grand tour around the bay, the longest, due to a certain lack-of-sleep-induced fuzziness of mind. Dad, the Captain, awake now, takes the decision to stop in Dartmouth when it's the furthest of all possible harbours before Plymouth. We survive quite well with this nice breeze, now 15-20 knots. It's the turnpoint in the race.
Could we have kept going? (Note: On arrival in Dartmouth harbour, our next berth neighbour said to me: « Oh yeah, you sure need some sleep, you all look dead. »)
Cowes - La Rochelle, Act 2: Pit-stop, wait and retirement
Eventually, We stopped at Dartmouth just to recover a moment before coming back to the race. At this time the wind is moderate but anyway we need an update on the weather forecast. That's when we decide we don't feel like facing what weather is predicted for Monday night and the following days.
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The barometer is very low and fronts come one after the other, it does not get any better. Only three yachts are still racing now: Foggy Dew, Hurricane and, tucked in the back of Dartmouth harbour, us. In the end we have to contact Ocean One and retire, because if we sail to La Rochelle, we won't be back at La Trinité in the required time. That's hard. Foxy F'Ewe will eventually cross the Channel two days later, after the gale.
Foggy Dew is the winner, followed by Hurricane only.
CONGRATULATIONS FROM THE CREW TO BOTH WINNERS !
We would have been very happy with Guigui, Antoine or Dod aboard. What we need now is a proud team of jolly good warriors, good oilskins and the motivation to sail out again. The yacht is a beauty. Nothing was broken, we only lost a batten from the solent (!) jib.
Note: Next year, no La Rochelle Race.
2009 is a Fastnet Race year...