These Boats are Weapons!
The weather routing we did yesterday worked out perfectly. It was like taking the chairlift up to the top of the hill for the big burn down. We rode some nice southwesterlies up to the north west side of Ireland yesterday and this morning. The wind slowly turned from south to west over 4 hours this morning. Then the wind direction went from west to north in 2 minutes when the front passed us. It happend so fast that all we did was turn the boat 90 degress and nothing had to be adjusted. Soon after, we set the kite (spinnaker) and sent it. 30 knots of boatspeed for the Pearl in 27 knots of wind. These boats are weapons! Got some firehosing going and plenty of green water over the deck. We shot some good video of the day which our friends at Disney will be happy to see.
We spent most of the day trying three different sails that we wanted to look at and burning through 200 miles in 10 hours. We are now in throttle back mode for the night only hitting 25 every once in a while. We sailed around the bottom of Ireland and are heading for the Scilly Isles off the southwest tip of England. Hope fully we wont have to gybe there tonight and we can keep ripping toward Brest, France. We will gybe there tomorrow and send it back out into the Atlantic for about 500 miles and then head into Vigo hopefully on Sunday if the wind holds. Right now the weather models look good for us.
The work list is getting long as is always the case with new boats. But here we are pushing the hell out of this boat one week after it very first sail. Overall, she seems to be a sound structure and the big elements like the keel and mast all seem to be solid. We do need to do some serious pounding upwind before we can give the final verdict.
I just finished up cooking dinner for the guys and am now writing up my worklist. Everyone is writing up their worklist now so we can email it to our shore team tomorrow so they can prepare for next week. Time is critical to this campaign so we have to make every hour count.
Back to the work list.
Paul onboard The Black Pearl
