Champagne Sailing away from Spain

First day at sea , of a long journey to South America. It seems a bit strange: I was at cooking duties where we left, so as a result, I ended up having 24 hours outside of the normal watch schedule. After preparing lunch and dinner, I went to bed for a whole night and when I woke up this morning, I had the entire morning to myself until my watch resumes at 1pm. So I feel like my race is only starting now!

I am taking the opportunity of this lazy time to write to you all. This new race couldn’t be more different than the last one: beautiful sun, warm weather, downwind under spi, boat (nearly) horizontal: champagne sailing as they say! I was on deck a bit earlier, and we got a large pod of dolphins joining us for a while. They were playing passing in front of us, back and forth. Among them was a grey-blue mother with her little calf, sticking to her side and never letting her go more than a meter or so ahead. What a joy to look at them.

It is really easy to like sailing when the conditions are like this. Funnily enough, we had planned very light first meals to account for seasickness, taking clues from the last race start. But everyone is in great shape and we needed up having hungry people raiding the snack corner last evening. So this morning we are boosting quantities to compensate!

Race wise, we are doing ok, in the middle of the fleet. We got some slightly lighter air than the pack in front of us during the night so they are about 20 miles ahead of us. We can see 3 of the 4 behind us. Basically we are all stuck together at this point.

We adjusted our local boat time to 30 min earlier than Spain, so we have the 2 clocks for UTC and local with 90 minutes difference: it reminds me of travelling to India from Singapore when I was with McKinsey..

Earlier today, I got to do some food housekeeping. We have so much frozen and cooled food that freezer management is key. I noticed that our freezers were at -13c instead of their -18c target. This is because the overall temperature has been raising and our freezers is having a harder time generating the cold we need; so we need to install our forced ventilation system in the forward compartment. Michael and I will do this latter today. I also moved all the butter to boxes filled with water (it is surprising how many products can survive a long time without being refrigerated).

That’s about it for today. I am feeling grand.

Take care,

Henri

At last docking at Puerto Sherry at 4AM local time after the much harder-than-expected Leg 1

10 September 2025

Bathing in warm sunshine as we departed Puerto Sherry with the yacht fixed and equipped for the second leg of the race which is also our first ocean crossing!

14 September 2025