We are sitting in a secondary low pressure system for a couple of days now, which has developed between two high pressure systems. It is that low which is responsible for the winds which are blowing from roughly the direction we want to go: east. Thus our progress is slow. We are beating against the wind and only make small progress towards the finish. On a positive note however we are not falling further behind. […]

The last few days have been intense. Regarding the race we have been doing great. The distance to the boats ahead has been reduced, while we could increase our lead over the boat behind us. Overall we are very pleased with our performance. This has been possible due to strong northerly winds. This allowed us to make good speeds with the undamaged rudder in the water. In addition to the fast sailing conditions the northerly […]

After we broke our rudder we were underway with wind coming from the wrong side for some time. With the good rudder on the windward side we had to make sure the boat stayed more or less level as to not lift the rudder out of the water. Correspondingly the sail plan has to be chosen conservatively, which meant our progress was slow. After the wind turned and we had it on our favourable side […]

It was the first day with low pressure conditions which the North Pacific is famous for. We were on a beam reach and made good speed towards Seattle. And that despite the wind blowing at force eight and regularly gusting to force nine. The sea state was correspondingly high and came in from the same direction, hitting us beam on. Thus, it was very wet on deck. We had changed our headsail already early on […]

In the past few days the wind has been rather variable. Sometimes we had barely any wind and then it was a little more but coming from the wrong direction. As a result our progress was pretty slow. On the other handwe were able to utilise those times of low wind for some cleaning and maintenance work. Thus our boat is as shiny as it was on the first day. Now we are preparing the […]

After a short but very intense stopover in Tongyeong we are underway to cross the Pacific. Or at least on our way into the Pacific. The start followed the meanwhile well known order. However, we were treated to a festive farewell ceremony on the main stage in the race village. Following that we slipped lines and had our parade of sail. The start itself was then quite slow, as we had expected. At just under […]

After a rather tiring approach to the Philippines we managed to get a few days of recovery. After the mandatory deep clean of the entire boat and the usual maintenance work we only had to carry out a few repairs, as we do in every stopover. The biggest by far was the repair of our spinnaker. It took some time but even herr the team was able to make good progress and get a day […]

The last few days were relatively low on wind. There is the occasional squall passing by, bringing us some more wind. But all in all the wind was low to very low and the progress was respectively slow. The boats ahead seem to have stronger winds and thus the distance to the next boat ahead has grown from 20 nautical miles to more than 150 nautical miles. But also the boas behind us seem to […]

The second half of this race has not really started as we had anticipated. First we were caught off guard by the speed and force of a squall. It looked like we might be able to outrun the squall and avoid the worst part, but then the wind started building surprisingly fast. Right after the decision was taken to drop the spinnaker we were hit by a gust that put us on our side. To […]