It is Saturday afternoon, and I am sitting by a beach,
listening to the waves crashing over lemon yellow sand. Tree branches are
swaying gently in the on the shore, but out in the bay there are a few ‘white
horses’ skittering along the water, part of the low pressure system that is
passing over the top of Brittany over the weekend. Today we should have been
sailing the prologue race (a windward leeward ‘sausage’ course), with a start
at 2pm, but due to the building breeze it was cancelled. The start too has been
postponed until Monday morning, due
to the rough sea state out in the English Channel, and the fact that it would
have been wind against tide in the Chanel Du Four. To send 51 Minis out into
5-6m waves with wind on the nose would be unwise.
Still the
postponement has been no bad thing, as there have been some developmental
tweaks to do on the Pogo 2 I am sailing on. The boat has just had a new nke
system and rigging put on, and yesterday one of the nke fitters came to explain
how it all worked. Unfortunately I couldn't separate the stream of French
consonants and vowels into words; so I am left with the manual to read!
We passed the
security check late on Friday afternoon, after having to go and buy some more
charts for the south coast of France- in case the course was changed from going
to the Fastnet Rock, as has happened in many previous editions. Sea-dye, a fire
extinguisher, soft wood plugs and emergency rations were all on the list too,
and as it was my birthday, I treated
myself to a rather fancy waterproof chart case. Sailing a Mini means getting
drenched all the time, and those little sheets of paper are all you have to
navigate with; so it is essential to look after them!
Speaking of
chart work, I don’t have access to Adrena or any routing software out here, so
shall be having to do it by hand with the GRIB files and charts. I was up very
late the night before I left gathering information about tidal streams and getting
some accurate waypoints down for the whole of the course; I will be finishing
this off on Sunday with the latest forecast ahead of the race.
The last jobs
that needed to be completed today were fairly simple ones- some splicing,
stitching, sail repair and packing enough food for the race. It was also quite
fun to write up a list of French-English sailing words, just in case my skipper
and I get confused and start pulling the wrong ropes!
There are almost 30 series boats entered, and it is great to see some of the guys who were down for the UK Fastnet.
It is a
fantastic crowd here, paritculary as it a practice run through for the Transat
in October. We have had a couple of receptions and briefings about the Transat,
discussing things like transport options. Most nights the fleet eat together, typically 9 0’clock or later; very different to what I am used to!