News
Those can be found on our photoalbum. Finally we would like to wish you all a happy new year and lots of smooth sailing in 2003. At last we're bringing you an update again.Telecommunications are limited on St. Lucia and the satelite system wasn't very cooperative either. We still owe you the photo's The good news is; WE'VE WON OUR DIVISION!! Of course we are very happy with the result. On Tuesday december 10th around half past four in the afternoon, we crossed the finishline in Rodney Bay, two hours ahead of our nearest rival. One of our jibs was ripped into peaces, minutes before the finish while taking it down. All together it took us a little over 16 days for the crossing, which is faster then we expected. Some yachts in our class were even days behind us. Staying relatively North in the first part of the crossing, kept us out of the very light wind, which caught the boats which sailing more in the lower latitudes. We never went slower then 6 knots durring the entire leg. The atmosphere is great in Rodney Bay. Boats are still coming in every day and the bar is allmost open for 24 hours a day, allowing all the crews to share their experiences with others. After 2,5 weeks of Coca Cola, the first beers hit us hard. But we're getting used to them again. Pricegiving is going tot take place next Saturday. Meanwhile we will take a brake and do some sightseeing around the island. St. Lucia is great. The people are very friendly. Transportation is well orginized. Small busses take you anywhere for 1 EC dollar (approx. ¤ 0,40). A couple of times during the day it is raining shortly and the isle is therefore very green. Stortemelk will be sailed to St. Martin the beginning of January by René and Frans where she will act as a supportvessel during the Heineken Regatta. The regatta itself we will be sailing on the new J/105. There are plans to leave Stortemelk in the Caribbean for another year, but that's 100% sure. The next update is depending on availability of a telephoneline to connect to my Apple iBook, so we can share the latest photo's with you. Iridium is not suitable for that purpose. For the time being we say goodbye to all of you. Of course we want to thank you for visitting our website and for all the nice e-mails and guestbook enties we've received from you. We enjoyed reading them. We will meet some of you personally again in the (near) future. Finally we want to thank our sponsors PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Boekel De Nerée and Galaxy Business Networks for their support of our project as well as our 'supportteam' on the shore. Andy, Jean-Paul, Denise, Pascal, Bobby, Marco, Ferry and all the other volunteers who helped us in one or more stages of our project; well done and very much appriciated. Smooth sailing! Surviving the last miles If one can speak about survival if you are experiencing +30 degrees airtemperature end 20 to 25 knots of wind from behind, we are doing quite well. We expect to finish in Rodney Bay on Tuesday by the end of the day. Hopefully we will be first finisher in our class. For the slower boats it looks like its going to be a long way to go. Very light winds are expected in the weatherregions which are a couple of hunders miles behind us. Fresh food is nearly finished now. If we haven't eaten it alrleady, we have to throw it overboard. Yesterday we had a test with the brown bread which was supposed te be 'long life'. Those who ate from it, were frequent visitors of the WC last night. We put the remaining bread over the side. Yesterday we saw again dolphins.Other boats reported whales. We also see a lot of flying fishes. Only two more beautifull nights under the stars are remaining. On the other hand, the idea of drinken a couple of beers in the Shamrock (the place to be in Rodney Bay, according to insiders) sounds very attractive to us. First material problems Today is a special day; in Holland we celebrate Sinterklaasavond. We might be lucky and find some presents onboard. Also it's the birthday of Junior, the son of our crewmember Johan. Congratulations from the whole crew of Stortemelk Junior! Yesterday we did our hourly update in our journal. Apart from our position we also keep record of our distance, windspeed & direction, speed and course. However the GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver was turned of and would start uo again. We checked all the cabling to find out that those were OK. It had to be the receiver itself, so we decided to open it up, hoping to find a faul breaker. However it turned out the whole box was black inside with a burny smell. It's not going to work ever again, that's for sure. It was a very expensive one with the word 'Professional' written all over it. Luckely we have a spare haldheld unit. Hopefully this one will keep on working for the last 1.000 miles. Sometimes a tropical shower passes by. Yesterday we had a very heavy one and in notime everybody was on deck taking a shower. As one could expect, the rain stopped, while most had just soap all over their bodies, so it ended up as a saltwater shower eventually. During the days temperatures moves up well over the 30degrees Celsius, but the wind keeps on blowing. According to our information (which is probably not as good as your information from the Worldcruising website) we are still leading our class. We calculated that our advantage over Song of the Sea is just over 20 nautical miles who is in second position. We have to stay sharp. Also there is Charisma, a Swam 44 in our class, who hasn't reported it's position for many days. The last update we received was from last week, when he was 35 miles behind us. It will stay exiting till the finish in Rodney Bay. Today we'll reach our halfway point of our Atlantic crossing. It's an important moment for the crew of the Stortemelk. We managed to save an extra beer in the freezer for this special occasion. Last night we experienced some great surfs with a record at 14.5 knots. Last 24 hrs we sailed just under 200 miles, just on our two jibs! The autopilot does it's job very well, allthough it asks for quite a bit of extra energy to do so. Our generator is willing to provide this for just 1 litre of diesel per hour. Quite a good deal to our opinion. We are doing quite well in the rally and as far we can see we are leading our class at this moment. Unfortunately there are some other boats which are not so lucky. Tragedy occured onboard the yacht Toutazimut a Formosa 51 sailed by the two brothers Hitchcock from the UK. One of the two fell overboard couldn't be hauled out again by the other. He draughned although he was wearing a lifeline. A Mayday went out by SSB and two yacht closest to Tautazimut changed their course to assist the remaining crewmember. A black day for the ARC, which also effected the atmosphere onboard Stortemelk for at least a day. At this stage we have met dolphins for almost half an hour, leading our way at the bow of Stortemelk. We also see a lot of flying fishes of which one managed to hit Frans at the back of his head while flying over our cockpit. We assume the fish must have had a bigger headach afterwards then Frans did. We are getting close to 19 degree North. The days are getting warmer and during the night a short and T-shirt will do perfectly. The High at 34N35W will likely to give us enough Easterly winds for the next couple of days. Our future looks good. Disavantages of a downwind life Since the evening of the 25th November we've been mainly experiencing wind from from E/NE. As you know, we were not very happy with the wind on the nose right after the start. However, downwind courses have their disadvantages too. For some time in the beginning, we were able to fly the genaker. The last couple of days the wind comes straight from behind. In rough seas it can be extremely uncomfortable. It's very difficult to keep the boat on course in these conditions. Yesterday we tried to make a tradewind rig with a second (spare) jib and no mainsail. Last night was far more comfortable and our speed is still between 7 and 9 knots in a straight line towards St. Lucia. This morning the totall distance to go was less then 2000 miles. We are experiencing some difficulties in the position reporting to World Cruising in Cowes. We understood that our position on worldcruising.net hasn't been updated for at least two days, although we report our position daily via the SSB. The SSB reports system is based on the fact that the whole fleet is divided in 4 groups. Per group there are 3 Netcontroller. The netcontroller collects all the positions of the yachts in his or her group and send those positions to Worldcruising in Cowes. Worldcruising puts all the positions on their website. That's how it should work. Fact is that the system is quite weak and at serveral point things can go wrong. We haven't any idea about the positions of our competitors in our division for the last couple of days. Maybe we will know more by the end of today. The athmosphere is good onboard Stortemelk. At lot has to do with the great cooking-skills of our chef Johan. As I'm typing this update, I get some ham and eggs served with some sliced tomato and bread. Our watch system starts at 18.00 hrs and ends at 14.00 hrs. The remaining 4 hrs are being used for work at the boat, our warm meal and a happy hour with salmon, toast and french cheese from Spain. The drinks are replaced by cola. Its amazing how quick you get used to that. On the day of departure we go over the the last safetychecks. All the fresh stuff is onboard now as well. Our foodsupply is finished, allthough we are a little unsure if w look to some other boats around us. Our Norwegian neighbour took in 250 eggs and we saw a Swiss boat taking in enough alcohol to stay permanent drunk during the crossing. We have chosen for a alcoholfree crossing. Only some beers are well put away for the moment we cross the finish. The start is chaos. However the cruiser division was advised to keep the engine standby during the start. We are quite happy with tyhe advise when the boat infront of us goes fullpower in reverse! After a few hours the wind turns 180 degrees and becomes SW 30 knots. We are not amused. During the next 24 hours the wind becomes NNW and we are making good progress into the right direction, hopefully on our way to the tradewinds. Today we gave our first position report over the SSB. The boats we see around us at this moment are generally much bigger, so we don't seem to do so bad. After going through an endless todo list, we seem to be reasonably ready with everything. At Wednesday we had our safetycheck and with some minor advises, we are a 'safe' vessel. The tanks are filled all the food and beverage is onboard, so ikt's time to leave. Our trip to Las Palmas was a very easy and fast one, unlike the struggle towards Lanzarote. We sailed the 110 miles in just 14 hours, a beautifull run. Most participants are there allready in. It's hard to believe that we are in the middle of an economical dip when look around you. There is a large representation of brandnew Swan's, Farr's and other multimillion costing yachts. With a 40 footer you are a 'small boat' We are continueing with all the preparations. The local chandler is doing very good business. This afternoon we are going to visit Marco, who is representing our sponsor PriceWaterhouseCoopers. After arriving in Almerimar a couple of things needed to be done like shopping and doing some small repairs. The last days before our departure from home has been quite exhausting for most of us, partly to finish all the project that needed to be done and partly caused by the various farewell parties which friends and relatives set up. Some of us decide to skip dinner in order to make a long night rest. On saturday we are still busy with some last preparations when we meet a Belgian guy named Willy (Crazyness is undangerous as long as you know it) He has been solo motorboating large parts of the world. His vessel, a 15 meter steel motorboat is quite often seen on the Dutch innercoastal waters. The idea is to leave right after lunch. At the moment we are busy doing so, Andy who is joinning us during the first leg to Las Palmas seriously cuts himself with his Leaterman and immediatly needs a doctor. 12 stiches and a couple of hours later we are finally leaving. The wind coming from the direction were we have to go. The waves are short and steep. Beating will take far to much time under those conditions. We decide to use the engine. The combination of a bad sea and not enough sleep is testing for the crew. After a few hours, 4 out of six are seasick. 24 hours later most of us have left the worst part behind as we are sailing with 9 knots past Gibraltar in 30 knots of wind. 1 hour later the wind has dropped to 1-5 knots. We start the engine again. The days following we mainly use the engine. At the moment we start worrying about the fuel, the wind starts blowing from the northwest. We make good progression until the wind becomes westerly 24 hours later, increasing till 40 knots in showers. We can't keep course to Las Palmas anymore unless we are going to beat, a very unatractive option with the large waves we are facing. The boat is making quite some water trought al kind of deck ventilators. Also some crewmembers are becoming seasick again. Watches are becoming longer for the remaining crew and when the wind direction doesn't change, we decide to head for Lanzarote, the most northern isle of the Canaries archipel. The sea is becoming friendlier as we arrive under the east side of Lanzarote. After reading the pilots, we decide to go to Puerto Calera. It's never easy to enter a unknown harbour in darkness, esspecialy when the wind is blowing 35 knots. We hear vaguely a 'not posible' shout from the shore, but it doesn't stop us mooring our boat next to a yacht with a swiss crew, who are most helpfull in taking our lines. The next day we are using to get the boat back into a proper and dry condition again. All registered leaks are being solved and some ropes replaced by new ones. On Saturday 16 november is ready for takeoff again. The weatherforecast is promissing us wind from the Northeast in the next 24 hours. Las Palmas, her we come! After the crew had decided no to sail to Malaga due to very bad weatherforecasts, the boat is now waiting for us in Almerimar (a harbour somewhere between Malaga and Almeria). The last weeks behind our desks are there. Amazing what you have to do before you can leave! Both our private as wel as our business-agendas are overbooked. But 8 November is a final deadline. We are most happy if the time to leave has arrived. |