The Crew of Musandam reports “The last 24 hours have been incredible…
We have quite a bit of breeze that we shouldn’t have had, and now as I write this we don’t have the breeze we should have. It’s very much like the doldrums here, the most predictable thing about the doldrums is how unpredictable they are. We did think yesterday afternoon that we were off heading south east towards a point where the winds would go light, then shift to the south east and allow us to tack and head south. But nothing is quite so easy, and we are once again struggling with very light airs interspersed with fairly strong winds and torrential rains – and I mean torrential, you get as wet from the rain bouncing off the cockpit floor as you do from the raining coming down from the sky. The good news – if you are Loik and Mohsin is that this normally occurs on the Thierry and Hooch watch, they ride out the worst of it whist the other three of us grin at them from the hatch.
During these rain squalls you just have to sit and feather the boat, normally they don’t last too long, and don’t take you the wrong way too much – though we did have one at 2300 GMT that was big and carried us north for a while, not terribly helpful – Check out the race tracker to see Musandam heading north (the wrong direction).
So for now we are in a transition between the doldrums and the south east / east winds that we have been expecting to arrive, once they do we’ll be heading south rapido – but we can’t do anything without them so for now, for the on deck crew it is about making progress as best as possible (and trying to stay dry!). We have wind from 335 (the north west) right now, so we have gennaker and full mainsail, edging us eastwards.”
