Sunday October 27, 2013
The briefing from today’s Code Green has the fleet sailing directly to Lanzarote in the Canary islands. We’ve got another waypoint added to our Sailing Instructions. There is a Traffic Seperation Scheme at Cape Finistere. Offshore rules require racing sailboats to stay outside of any TSS. Now we are required to keep it to starboard keeping us quite close to Finisterre but keeping us tidily locked in and far away from the very very large low out in the Atlantic that is slowly working its way north east.
They desperately need to get this race started or they are thinking that they never will. There is another cold low setting in that’s going to sock us in if we don’t get going. Once we’re below Finisterre we’re pretty safe but until then it’s a desperate run!
It’s still pouring rain in France. Enough rain to cause drops in WiFi signal, which, to begin with, was none too fast. Makes downloading weather files problematic. Got my head buried in foul weather gear, downloading grib files. before I can bury my head in weather and tide tables to work out some routing options.
Monday we get towed out of the locked in harbour that and taken to Treboul so that we can do the start when we want rather than being forced into timing with the lock. [The harbour is inside the “lock” to maintain sufficient water level to float the boats. The lock is only open a couple hours either side of high tide.]
The race course at the moment is straight to the Canary Islands but we’re required now to keep the TSS off of Cape Finisterre to starboard, locking us all into a narrow corridore at Cape Finisterre of about 15n miles.
I’ll send an update after Monday’s 1900 briefing (7pm France or 1pm Toronto).
View Mini Transat: First Leg: 1,257 Miles to Lanzarote in a larger map
