Fog on the approaches

I am writing this while we are about 400 miles out of Stanley. We are travelling slowly in light wind and thick fog at the moment.

Well in my last post I mentioned that we were about to make some tactical decisions about when to turn south. That became something of an issue as a couple of strong low pressure systems spun out of the River Plate estuary blocking our passage to the south. One produces hurricane strength winds in Uruguay where, we have heard, winds of 78 knots were recorded. That system caused us to run NW for a while as we didn’t fancy fighting it.

We did eventually manage to turn south and spent a couple of day making long tacks on whatever board gave us the best deal. We had a couple of problems caused by the strong breeze the worst of which was that our staysail blew out and is beyond repair, at least by us as it is quite a hight tech carbon/vectran job. There was only about 30 knots of apparent wind at the time it gave out but I suppose it has had a very hard five years of service which must be close to 100,000 miles – not bad!

For the last few days we have had the genoa and yankee set on the poles wing-and-wing as we head for the Falklands with light northerlies; unusual but we’ll take it 🙂

Our friends on “Paradise” are somewhere in the same part ocean heading in the same direction and we have been exchanging daily position reports we are withing 20 to 30 miles of each other so the race is on.