Counting your chickens
Our eagerly anticipated veer came in on the dot at 1300 hrs allowing us to tack through 60 degrees and thrash along at 6.6 knots just 10 degrees short of the layline – perfect textbook management of a beat allowing for a further veer and avoiding the trap of overstanding. Hmmm!
Feeling dangerously pleased with ourselves we tucked in to a celebratory lunch which was soon interrupted by a marked lessening of the wind and a dramatic loss of speed as we punched smack into the left over waves. An hour later we were practically becalmed, and even worse the boats ahead were sailing away with a nice breeze from the original direction.
Back to the drawing board! Eventually the breeze trickled down to us and we are once more heading NW on port tack and having long and convoluted discussions about how to handle the rest of the beat to the rock. If it IS going to be a beat ? We still expect the wind to fill in from the NE!
Luckily Chris and I are happy as lambs discussing the minute details of all this stuff, which is probably why we are sailing two handed. Anybody else would just go stir crazy listening to us!