The last 30 hours and probably quite some time to come too we have been flying spinnaker and asymmetric in fantastic conditions. 14-22 knots of breeze and boat speed between 7,5 and 15. OK, through the night we took down the spinnaker and went wing on wing with the jib to windward and heavy weather jib + main to leeward which is a very easy setting to sail with and in the afternoon, we had a couple of squalls so the sail setting was chosen to get some good sleep.
Our progress has been good so far and we are leading the race against our 4 competitors in our routing program. Every second day we are downloading weather forecast and routing. Predictwind which we are using have 4 weather models which again give 4 different routes to sail between the waypoints we are setting. We are trying to guess (together with our weather guru back home Mads) where we can be during the next 5 days and then we ask the routing program which is the quickest route. On downwind as we are sailing now, we have used the polar diagram (theoretical speed on all wind angles and strengths) from an IMX 40 but we have tuned up the speed a little bit. We are sailing a little bit quicker than this right now and the explanation is probably that it is always a little bit more wind in reality than the forecasts. Another thing is when sailing downwind on the ocean the boat is doing more downhill than uphill.
Tomorrow it`s party day! Maren is having birthday and we are going to have cake. You are all invited we have enough. At the end of the day tomorrow we may also celebrate half the distance sailed.
The bottle post link on the blog has had some issues but is working now. We cannot see what`s going on at face before we get to normal internet connection again, this also explain our lack of interest about what is going on there.
