It was a rough night for the Class40 fleet. The culprit was the depression that's been talked about for days now, sitting north of the Azores, and it swept through the fleet with winds gusting to 40 knots.
Some boats managed to claw their way clear of it by this morning. Guillaume Pirouelle (Sogestran - Seafrigo) has held onto the lead, but Robin Follin, sailing Solano on a more southerly track, could yet spring a surprise.
Follin described conditions after the worst of the storm had passed through. "It's okay, even though there are still some proper smacks going through the boat, and we're down to just 17 knots of wind now. I must have had 32 knots at the max, but the real problem is the state of the sea. It's a building site out there."
He'd expected things to settle once the front moved through. They haven't.
"I thought it would calm down after the front passed, except there's still a huge, messy swell coming from every direction. Even in light air, the boat tends to bury itself in the waves pretty quickly, so it's not easy to go fast or find the right settings. And with conditions so unstable, it made for a pretty rough cocktail of a night."
A long starboard tack stretches ahead of him, at least 36 hours of it. The nights, he says, feel endless.
"Honestly, I feel like the sun's been switched off for days and we haven't seen it since. To go fast you'd need to be out on deck the whole time. On a shorter race I'd stay out all night fine-tuning the settings. Here, I spent two hours trimming, then started flagging. I went below to check the weather and now I feel like changing the genoa. It never ends. My partner tells me to rest, but there's always work to do."
Despite the grind, Follin is relishing the tactical side of the crossing.
"Since the start of the race I've been very calm. I'm just rolling through it steadily and things are going well. What I love about a transat is that there are genuine strategic choices to make. It's not like the shorter season races, which feel more like a merry-go-round. Here you can really think through your route, and I'm enjoying that a lot. I don't know if my positioning will keep paying off, but I think our little intermediate group should come out of this reasonably well. I don't know exactly what's happening further north. We're just making our way."
