026 29.9N 024 58.1W Today was a nice start to the day with a quiet night and lower winds. The sea state was much calmer and despite the night watches we all got more sleep. Today the forecast is for the wind to build from the North East and so we are going to set our parasail and see how that works for the boat. We have only set it once before, in Las Palmas harbour, so fingers crossed that it goes up and sets well – picture included below if it works !! We have dropped down the leader board a bit but we are back on a rumb line course and our VMG is back to the same as our SOG so all is well o ..read more

Nice to see our boats getting properly used. This 346 is in a shared ownership scheme in Portugal and is well loved! Catamaran “Audrey 2” out strutting her stuff with the family Bannister family onboard doing Competent Crew and Cat Conversion course. The post Audrey2 Strutting Her Stuff appeared first on Broadblue Catamarans ..read more

17 09.9N 051 19.7W   We had a very good last 24 hours now we have the winds within our sail wardrobe window. The last 24 hours we covered 204nm towards the final destination, as defined by the ARC team, and only 4 other boats in the remaining fleet were faster!   If we can continue to sail at this pace then we should be able to move up another 2 places in our class and a massive 20 places overall! Once the engine running hours are taken into account the gains are likely to be more as some the others needed to motor for a long time after the start whereas we managed to sail pretty soo ..read more

18 06N 47 53W Woke up to an early watch this morning with the prospect of a good day of winds. As the sun came up it became clear that the sea state had abated slightly and that the squalls had thinned to the point where we are now ready to fly the parasail again. The sail is 252 sq m and so it’s a lot to handle but the foredeck of the rapier 550 offers a big space to do that. We set it once and then realised there was a small tear in it and so we took it down again, repaired the tear and as I write this it has been up now for about 3 hours. Helming this boat is easy under any circumstances bu ..read more

18 19N 45 12W The downwind ride continues with 20-30 knot tail winds. Still too much wind to put up the parasail but we are making good progress under jib and reefed main. We have made up a couple of places on the multihull fleet and look forward to a little lighter weather tomorrow. We passed the 1000 miles to go milestone last night without incident. watching TV and relaxing on this boat is very easy, even in the arduous outside conditions and so it not really a hardship. The worst thing so far is that I forgot to change over the water tanks before my shower yesterday and ran out of water be ..read more

  19 53N 042 36.3W   It’s really hard to describe how easy this Rapier 550 is to live with at sea! The winds are varying from 20-35 knots and the sea state is quoted as 3-4m, but seems a lot bigger when you are in them, and yet we are all in shorts and t-shirt, seated watching the world go by as the washing machine completes the next load! The view from the back doors is intermittently of a wall of grey/blue sea and then open water into grey cloud and yet the boat just handles it and gets on with it’s job of delivering us safely to St Lucia.   In trying to decide how fast to ..read more

Still generally making good progress despite the lack of a spinnaker. The wind strength remains stubbornly high and over night we had some quite bad squalls so lots of waves and wind to make sleeping a little more difficult. The inside helm position makes life really easy on Blue Wonder for watch changes and today when the wind rose above 40 knots for an hour it was very comforting to have everyone together, under cover, with a clear view of the sea and waves and alongside the sail controls.  As we surfed down the face of one wave we hot over 18 knots and so we simply took a anot ..read more

22 10.41N 34 49.36W The Easterly has continued over night but dropped to 20 knots and so we decided to sail under Asymmetric Spinnaker alone, which was going really well for a while. The seas are still quite big (3-4m) but from behind and the Asymmetric was pulling really well with boat speed constantly around 12 knots and rising down the front of the waves to 14 or 15. ETA St Lucia came down with the better speeds and we were all feel very pleased with our selves! Even the motion of the boat was better at speed and from the forward helm position you could see really easily the sail shape and ..read more

The wind forecast for today was pretty much as expected and so we kept up the parasail over night and gained around 80 miles in 24 hours on most of our direct competitors. The combination of the fast hulls, aft dart keels and forward helm allowed us to be confident and secure when sailing fast with the big sail. However, the wind is always the master and the latest forecast shows that the Easterly trade winds we have been waiting for are about to arrive and with a bit more strength than we were hoping – the decision to swap the parasail for the jib was made just in time and the deck crew worke ..read more

24 18N 26 07W We are pleased to have escaped the worst of the weather to the North of us – it was unpleasant for us and I hope the others aren’t being battered too much! We are now in much lower wind strengths but with quite a lot of swell running. The boat is riding all of the conditions really well and very pleased with the choice of hull shape and layout for this type of trip. The sail plan is Asymmetric Spinnaker and full mainsail in 6-10 knots of wind with 5-6 knots of boat speed but the wind direction means we can’t get back to the direct line to St Lucia just yet. We are choosing to sai ..read more