East of New York - 8 June

We had a lovely sunny day for leaving New York, which made the view over Manhattan even better than we arrived under cloudy skies. The leaving took about half a day, with a lot of media stuff going on, a parade of sail with lots of photos of the boats with the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty in the background.

Slipping out of the marina

Parade of sail on the Hudson

Crew to their positions

Having been up at 6.45, it was a long day, as got to bed a midnight. It was really hard, then being woken at 2.30, but once up it was great night sailing.

I had a terrific time in NYC. I didn't manage to see all I would have liked, but there were always limitations by the time. I'll just have to go back sometime. Steve and Chris, who came out to be with me during the stop-over, were able to see a lot more. About a week after my arrival, I think the adrenalin finally stopped flowing and my body just felt as though it had been hit by a bus. The cure was two early nights followed by lying in until lunchtime and I felt recovered and ready to go on the next leg.

They bought a Shuttle to add to the spectacle

A famous lady

The race started out to sea, beyond the channel approach to New York, so a “le mans start”, where the boats line up along an imaginary start line. The fore sails can be hanked on, but all the crew have to be behind the coffee grinder at the one minute gun. At the start signal the crew rush forward to hoist the foresails and off you go. This time we had the added spice of needing to hoist the spinner, which is allowed ten minutes after the start.

However all the boats had the pole plugged in ready to at the start. It was quite a sight seeing all the spinnakers go up, almost in unison, but unfortunately for them, the New York boat had hanked theirs on sideways so I think they will have lost a lot of ground. It did look funny seeing it fly sideways, but I felt for them. It is so easy to make a mistake.

All thought the night the boats have been pretty close so we are very aware of needing to keep sharply focused during this very short race to Halifax. Time lost due to a mistake will be much more difficult to make up.

We are all of a like mind to push fairly hard to hopefully raise our position in the overall standings and a podium place would be good.