The boat feels quick, the deck’s wet and the wind keeps blowing steadily at 20 knots. We are reaching – the wind comes from the side – at 85-90 degrees of wind angle. The light changes rapidly – we are sailing towards the east and the sun comes up and goes down earlier. I moved lunchtime once and dinner twice to match the solar time more and not end up having dinner at 2am UTC.
The heat is strong and humidity is stronger than ever. You really need the ventilator to get some sleep and the smallest movement causes you to start sweating straight away. Wearing your waterproof gear is a pain, but it’s better to be on deck than inside the boat. We are constantly bailing to not have any water inside so that it doesn’t condensate and doesn’t add any extra weight.
We still have our transmission problems: we can neither receive nor send data, but we hope we can repair the FB500. We will take it apart when the sea and the wind ease a bit, in two or three days time.
Conversations are getting started about Auckland and what you see, eat and do there. We are also aware that we’ll have plenty of work to do once we get there, due to all the breakages we’ve suffered in the last few days.
Today, for the first time in more than a week, we have no boats on our AIS system. It feels weird, we know they are somewhere near, but we don’t know exactly where. But this is an offshore race and it’s impressive just to see how close we are after so many days – less than ten miles from boat to boat.
The mood is good onboard. We are looking forward to the wind easing a bit to work on the antenna. In a few days we’ll be crossing the Doldrums and that can be tricky for MAPFRE. Strategy is a really big part of this race and today we are missing a key element, which is meteorology.
Little by little we enter the waters of Micronesia and we check the charts. I never thought I would sail in this part of the world. So far we haven’t seen any island, but we might do in the upcoming days!
#vamosMAPFRE!
Fran Vignale