A Strange Delivery

What a bizarre trip, planning times on the mini is very difficult. With no engine and a boat that does between 5-20 knots, your very weather dependent. Before I leave I always use a weather routing program call Maxsea that takes wind speeds, angle, tidal info etc into consideration and give you a target route, speeds and timing.

The routing said 17 hours, not including messing around at the dock both ends so I planned for 20 hours... it took 10 hours. With great code zero conditions. This would normally be a great thing, but I was heading to Les Sables, that had a very tight high walled channel that you are forbidden to sail up, even if it was physically possible. So you have to contact by radio for a tow if you have no engine. Great if you arrive between 6am and 10pm. I didn’t!

When I had 30 miles left to go I started to do something I have never done on the boat before and slow down. First I dropped the zero , then I took a reef and finally dropped the jib too. So I had 12 knots of breeze and just a reefed main, but for some reason Night Fever the rock ship didn’t want to slow down and we were still doing 7-8 knots SOG. I ended up arriving a 2am and doing circles for 4 hours till I could contact the marina.

I only hope that I’m going too fast in the race!

It didn’t stop there, I was all tied up by 7 and there were people everywhere by the boat, I thought it was very kind of them to make such a fuss but I’d only come from Lorient, then the penny dropped as I saw a procession of boats leading the Mini Transat sailed by Alessandro Di Benedetton. He had just completed his solo round the world. Here are a few pictures, you can barely make out the mini under as the modification. My favourite is he broke his mast and rather than throwing it away he lashed it to the front of the bow sprit to make the longest pole you’ve ever seen. Congratulations to him!