Day 1 (at last)!

I am writing this on Day 2 at 4PM PT. We’ve been under way for over 27 hours. Everything is going well so far.

We showed up at the dock early on departure day. Not much sleep the night before as I — and I am sure others — kept thinking about whether we had thought of everything. At the dock, we say bye to Gaby and Milan, to Antonia and to Arnaud. It’s a little emotional but not too much. Just the right amount.

We leave the dock to get near the starting line. We get near the starting line and draw the usual circles before the start. What’s cool is that Gaby. Milan and Arnaud are on a boat watching us. 12:55, we hear the gun. Everyone gets ready. Bertrand is at the helm. We cross the line nearly in the pole position. What a fabulous way to start. Well done Bertrand! But… the departure is called off. Not sure about the reason. But we need to return in front of the starting line. New departure. This is time, we’re getting the pole! Picture perfect. There is an helicopter taking photos. We are going to look good on all the websites.

After departure, it’s a long tack toward the west point of the Catalina island, which we have to clear. On our way there, we are passed by lots of boats are we surely are one of the slowest in the fleet. Around 5:30PM, we pass the west point and then it’s going to be 4000 kms of open ocean. The next land we will see will be Hawaii. Per sailing instructions, we text the race committee that we have cleared the catalinas.

There is not a lot of wind yet so we’re not at top speed. Hopefully the wind will pick up in the coming days. As I am writing this, we are now making good speed. We do not have the spinnaker out yet.

We start the routine. I cook dinner with Seb R, we eat some good food and then the shifts begin. We have shifts of 2:30 hour each and I am paired with Seb F. Bertrand and Seb R are together and Olivier is with Fred. The first night begins. And then the first dawn. I managed to sleep decently. It’s not warm but it’s not freezing. Most people but not all managed to sleep a decent amount.

First impressions: the boat is not big and so everything is tricky. For instance, finding a toothbrush takes time because everything is packed in the front. The boat is healing quite a bit and jumping up and down quite a bit so finding balance is tricky. It’s going to be a challenge to get organized and manage to do things with less effort. Today, I cleaned my feet with sailor’s soap but I can safely say that that this is a whole project.

I am also have to be realistic with this blog as the conditions for writing are not perfect — you can get sick quite quickly by staring at a screen — and our wifi GB allocation seems to go away fast. We have tried to block phones from doing a lot of background stuff and yet… We will put the starlink only a few minutes per day so we will almost never be in touch. I will also skip posting photos for now because this is a lot of data going back and forth. That’s life!

Anyway, things are going well. We must get used to life at sea.