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Varuna: Party and Endurance PDF Print E-mail
The party is over and the wind is gone. Hard times on VARUNA.

Good news first. We had a wonderful party for Finn's birthday. At 0000
UTC with the position 44.05.31 N and 62.00.88 E and 2293.7 nautical
miles to the finish, the whole crew met on deck and prepared a few Twix
with candles and woke Finn up with a nice happy birthday song. We had a
couple of beers and 3 or 4 of the crew's favourite songs on the outside
speakers. After that little relaxing break the routine kicked back in
and everybody went back to work or sleep. The only one's joining us this
afternoon were some whales and a shark. Unfortunately they forgot to
bring the barbie and the steaks so we had a nice freeze-dried chicken
curry and a bottle of freshly brewed watermaker water.

Until midday the wind was stable allowing us to be fast. Since then the
wind dropped drammatically and now we are slow, doing under 4 knots of
boatspeed. We hope that the weather changes as our routing predicts and
that the wind kicks back in so that we can continue our fast journey to
point alpha.

These conditions are challeging for the crew. Flapping sails and
changing winds are hard for our nerves. But we need to fight hard to
keep close to the boys on SHAKTI. Altough it's our sistership they are
lighter then us and faster in this light stuff.

We wish everybody a nice night in Europe/a nice afternoon in the States,
check the tracker again tomorrow morning. Hopefully the strategy will
pay of so that we will be back to the nice downwind sailing conditions.

So far so good...