It was with a lot of concern that we heard this morning that "City of Cape Town" was rolled yesterday and lost her rig, and that "Yachtport SA" broke her boom. Other than that we have little information so we hope all the guys aboard the two boats are OK. Apparently they are about 800 miles behind us and looking at the GRIB files it looks as if they must be in the worst of the weather being thrown out by the low pressure system that we are riding ahead of.
In my blog on the 22nd I mentioned that we were altering course to the north east in order to position ourselves in the optimum position for when this low pressure system arrives with its attendant gales. By the 24th it appeared that the low was being blocked by the high to the south west of Cape Town and this had slowed its forward progress but also caused it to intensify. Luckily for us our move to the north east now seems to have placed us in a steady northerly airflow which is carrying us at a good pace towards the Cape and allowing us to remain north of the low pressure. Obviously having heard of the trouble the guys are experiencing behind us we are re-evaluating our position very carefully but for now we feel confident that we are well placed where we are. At the moment we are broad reaching in great surfing conditions under reefed main and #4 jib with a nice warm breeze and partly cloudy skies.
This is perhaps an opportune time to thank our technical partners who give us the tools to help us make our routing decisions: Vizada and Xtra-link have provided the hardware, software and airtime that enable us to download high resolution, up to date, weather GRIB files, and Adrena has provided the routing software that enables us to analyse different scenarios accurately and quickly.
Of course, even with the technical back up we are still watching our backs carefully. Mid-Atlantic is not a place to get complacent about.
At the moment the Adrena software is giving us and ETA of 00H30 on 5 March but that should be taken with a pinch of salt when we still have over 1000 miles to go.
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