Bashing to windward in Leg2 of RBI

For us on class 40 this leg was pretty much a fleet restart, although
each had to respect the time of departure, exactly 48 hours from the
arrival in Kinsale, the differences where very small, and very light
winds at the start meant big gains and losses could be made over a puff
of wind in the bay, when building a little advantage over the followers
had taken the whole 36 hours of the first leg...

Phesheya did a good start, found some wind under the cliffs and slowly
but surely was first to round the headland. On the other hand, we
started terribly, there was no way to tell what it was but we simply
couldnt find the pace and slopped around the bay at dismal speed, we
even checked if we had wrapped something around the keel or the rudders,
but it was just us not finind the pace. By the headland the class 40
that was behind us, Solo, overtook us... then it got worse, a few hours
later another Class 40 was storming behind us considerably faster, it
was Alex Bennett on Fujifilm who had started some 40 minutes after us,
and chopped our advantage to nil in a matter of hours...

Clearly we were annoyed, angry and somehow confused... Alex tried to
pass by sheer speed to our leward and i guess this is where the red mist
kicked in for my co-skipper paul, the next 3 hours became a battle of
stubborn dinghy sailors about to approach the leward mark, only
difference we were 2 class 40s under spinnaker travelling at over 10kts
in the dark of the night... we were so close at some stage i was
fretting around the cockpit plenty worried, had Alex wiped out in a gust
it would have been impossible to avoid a collision.

The battle carried on and like two balls linked with an elastic we
gained and we lost and gained and lost until we rounded the Fastnet
Rock, Alex marginally ahead of us, some 200 meters...

After the rock we hardened up in the stiff breeze and pumped in our
ballasts, our boat being wider by a whole foot has more power (but
suffered in the light airs) so we finally caught up and took over.

Now it's 2pm on thursday and we've been bashing to windward from the
middle of the night, strong winds, bumby ride, slam, bash, bum, bam...

We can just make Phesheya over the horizon, perhaps 4 miles away but
cant really tell for sure... We caught up with solo from previous
position polls but now it seems we're playing elastic again, we're very
close but cant quite catch up...

We can still just see Alex over the horizon behind us, i'd say 2.5 to 3
miles but it's only an estimate, you can check on the tracker...

I guess as long as it stays heavy we're fine, we might, just might catch
up with Solo although i see little chance of catching up Phesheya, who
are sailing a fantastic race and deserve to be ahead, they made no
mistakes i can think of and their performance is very consistent.

We're not even half way to Barra so everything can change, Alex will
probably catch up again when the wind drops, i dont know where the
others are but anyone can sneak in from an unexpected choice of course.

This is the beauty of Class 40, after some 50 hours of racing from
Plymouth the first 4 boats are still in sight of one another, and anyone
can still play to win. Fantastic.

ciao for now!