Armchair Sailing? 

Gulf Stream ‘Thrash’ Begins  

Lead boats entered the Gulf Stream at around sunset Saturday, heading upwind into a moderate southwest wind with as much as 4 knots of favorable current in the long, hot meander that they’d been steering for since the race start on Friday afternoon.  Speedboat was making more than 12 knots over the bottom.  The earlier “champagne conditions” were behind them as they pounded into big, square, confused seas.

iBoattrack positions at 2 AM Sunday showed the 100-foot Speedboat (Open Division) averaging almost 14 knots with 271 miles to the finish. At that rate she’d have a shot at breaking the Bermuda Race 48-hour elapsed time record for cant-keel, Open Division boats – but that big favorable boost will disappear once Speedboat exits of the Stream for leg 3 of this 635-mile classic.


Speedboat at the start of the 2010 Newport Bermuda Race (Photo: Dan Forster)

Rán was 30 miles back.  Following close on the heels of the English boat in the Gibbs Hill Division were Titan XV, Beau Geste, Bella Mente, Rambler, Il Mostro, Vanquish, and Genuine Risk. This tightly bunched pack of eight has been separated by only a few miles since the start. 

Sunday morning the ‘big boat’ leaders were clear of the Stream and entering the 250-mile stretch of often confused wind and currents between the stream and Bermuda. Race veterans wryly call “Happy Valley,” where the race is won and lost.

Chris Museler, on Titan XV, filed this report just before midnight:

“Now this is what we came for! The boat is literally crashing into waves close reaching onto the Gulf Stream and the water temperature has leapt into the 80s. It’s getting darker and the Aramid rigging has been humming and groaning, and the deck bounces from each loud crack when a sheet or the traveler is eased. This wild ride comes from being in a positive eddy heading south, straight into it!  (Wind and current collide to stack up the seas the boats are crashing into.) This is getting to be fun after losing a bit to competitors this afternoon.  The bright sun and the flat water sailing are gone. 


Titan XV is currently behind Rán and the much larger Speedboat

“Can’t write anymore, quite hot and uncomfortable down here. So I’m on watch and will be seeing you in the morning. Knew I wouldn’t want to sail a Bermuda Race without a proper ‘thrash,’ as Mr. Rousmaniere calls it!”

The Smaller Boats

By dawn Sunday, Rán was out of the Stream, and the team was speculating in their blog that the smaller boats have had consistently more wind than the big ones. A hundred miles astern those smaller boats were entering the Stream. In Class 1, the St. David’s Lighthouse Division class for boats of  about 40 feet, two-time defending St. David’s champion Sinn Fein has chosen a course well to the right of the fleet leaders, her sistership Gone with the Wind  and the Tartan 41 Aurora. Sinn Fein was about 50 miles west of the rhumb line.