Some people may have been wondering why we have taken a more off shore route. As you can probably see from the tracker there are definitely a lot of boats that have gone inside us. Basically the PHRF boats that started on the Friday with us have all followed the same courses offshore and the bigger faster ORR boats that started on Saturday have gone slightly more inshore.
As I understand it the sled boats can duck into the inside of the course during the day to take advantage of the increased pressure due to the sea breeze and then they have the speed to get back offshore in the evening as the sea breeze dies and get back into the gradient more consistent offshore breeze during the night before doing the same again the next day.
As we are in the fleet with the slow boats we can not do this as we do not have the speed to get back out again before the breeze dies inshore, and we would be stuck. I think we have chosen a balance on the edge of the two about 25 -30 miles out, and so have the similar boats.
Today was a very slow day with the wind again but we are sailing as fast as we possibly can and although we have lost some ground the wind is back just as the sun set and we are flying along again. Hopefully this will continue through the night. The pattern with the wind has generally been breezy at night and shutting off in the morning. It does look more promising for the rest of the race now and if all goes well we could be in tomorrow evening. Fingers crossed.
Ben