I thought I’d be feeling better. I was right.

We changed sails earlier today to the R1, our high-clew reacher. We are sailing in 25 to 40 knots of wind and 8-meter waves.
Surf's up.

Did I mention we changed sails?

Now, that was an adventure.

Almost all the time, downwind, we fly our J4. It's a small jib foresail set on a furler off our staysail halyard. But during our sail change the tack pin broke. That severed the connection between furling unit, sail, and deck. So imagine 30 knots of wind. Imagine the head (top corner) and clew (back corner) of the sail still attached. Imagine the tack (should-be forward bottom corner) whip-slapping the air with a three-kilogram metal furling unit attached to the end of the whip. We're talking violence. As we tried to wrestle the sail to the deck I heard a voice remark,
Boy, this is dangerous . . .

Okay. (Deep breath.) Here goes. I’ve dreaded writing the blog entry on strategy and route to India. I can't do it with a simple screen shot and words. I think I’d need a 20-slide powerpoint deck and live commentary. Crossing the Indian Ocean, Cape Town to Cochin, is a complicated route. It has about five moving parts. Being adaptable and managing risk are key. Let's take a shot at a simple version:

Right now we are sailing on the backside of a low pressure system, as shown in the current position picture. The system is allowing us to fast-dash east, riding the southwest winds in this sector. We will head almost due east and past the scoring gate. For this leg our mid-scoring gate is Longitude 58 E. The boats farthest east will pick up the most points at this mid-leg gate.

Click to enlarge:



Just about the time we arrive at the scoring gate, the wind will shift to the northwest as another low pressure system catches up with us. This system can be seen on the Nov 21 projection below. This will allow us to turn to a northeasterly course, as you see from the red predicted course on the diagrams. We will follow this system for a day and a half as we head towards the prevailing east trade winds that live north of Latitude 30. The green dot at the end of the red line in each screen shot shows the location of the trade winds.



The transition from low pressure-driven northwesterlies to the east trades? That could be rough. I’ll spend the next few days working out the details of how to play the shift from one weather system to the next. Currently, we are too far away and it's too early. I don’t have all the information I need. We’ll stay adaptable.

The easterly trade winds will take us up to the doldrums. The last part of this leg is going to be tricky. The monsoon season is changing off the coast of India, so it’s tough to know whether we will finish in a southwest monsoon or a northeast monsoon. I’m keeping an eye on it (I'm probably not alone) and following the trends. Strategy decisions for that section are ten days away.

In the mean time we have some blistering fast sailing to do.