Team Adventure closes in on the Straits of Gibraltar
by Keith Taylor 20 Mar 2001 07:03 GMT
The 110-foot catamaran Team Adventure was only 400 miles from the Straits of Gibraltar this afternoon, after two days of high speed sailing in strong following northwesterly winds. With weather forecasts for the next few days becoming more consistent, the nine-man crew is now predicting they will finish The Race of the Millennium in Marseille some time on Friday.
"Most of Sunday was spent surging forward on a perfect sail, with speeds well over 20 knots all day, actually averaging around 25," skipper Cam Lewis reported by satellite email.
"With smooth seas and big sails, full mainsail, quadrilateral and staysail we are once again enjoying the marvelous characteristics of this flying machine. With the windward hull light most of the time, a moderate amount of spray flying, the helmsman concentrating, and a minimum of two crew standing by the sheets, we just skim over the ocean, gobbling up the miles.
"We are making fast miles to Gibraltar but from there it is less certain. We will have to wait a day or so to see what waits for us after that. It looks promising but we'll have to see what the wind gods of the Mediterranean come up with. The Med is one tricky place and we definitely want to get finished before a strong northerly wind called a Mistral rears its ugly head. This would make us beat upwind against massive cold winds and big horrific seas."
Lewis reported that the boat's ability to shorten sail had been affected by damage to the outboard end of the mainsail at the first reef point.
"The first reef point is not as strong as it once was, because a primary soft clew constructed from Kevlar has failed," he explained. "We are using the remaining back-up safety webbing and we are hoping this holds for the rest of the voyage.
"The mainsail is an amazing pieces of equipment, engineered and built out of super high tech fabrics, with hundreds of carefully cut and shaped small pieces sewn and glued together. It is then attached on the boom, bolted to cars that travel up and down the mast and is hoisted aloft with a halyard strong enough to lift your house on a 140-foot long all-carbon tube that is big enough for a man to go up inside all the way to the top. This whole contraption needs to withstand sun, salt, rain, hail, chafe and the occasional broken battens with over 29 tons of static load on the mainsheet and dynamic loads of, who knows, maybe 45 tons.
"This one small failure, is the biggest to date and it really has not slowed us down yet. Going upwind in waves with a single reef will not be possible because the webbing that is remaining will certainly fail. However, this should not change things much as far as getting to the finish is concerned."
The deadline for teachers to apply for two communicators' jobs aboard Team Adventure on a "Voyage of Discovery" from Lisbon, Spain to San Salvador in the Bahamas has now been extended to April 1. The search is being conducted by Monster.com, the world's leading global online careers site and the major sponsor of Team Adventure. To view the job listing, go to www.monster.co.uk and use the search words "schoolteachers ahoy".
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