Jibing to the finish line

25 June 2017

After a long, wet day a with a lot of challenging steering the finish is in sight. The past 24 hours we have tried to sail broad reach as much as possible, with as much wind in our sails as possible to get as much speed as possible. First, we steered directly to the finish line, but because the wind veered we had to change our course. With a few other ships, we drifted east. The forecast said the wind would shift more, but ‘when’ was the big question. And then the next question: when do we jibe? If we go to early, then we will need to jibe two more times and if we wait too long we will get too close to shore with little wind.
We just did and it seems like good timing. The ‘Spirit of South Carolina’ followed us immediately and the ‘Alexander von Humboldt’ decided to jibe a bit earlier and it seems like this wasn’t a good idea because we are already overtaking them.
We also spotted the ‘Gulden Leeuw’ on the AIS. Luckily, they are still 15 miles behind. We haven’t spotted ‘Europa’ yet so we don’t know where they are.
We’ll see; we are now heading for the finish line and then we have to wait for the official race results.
(The ‘Oosterschelde’ finished at 06:30 GMT).