[Greyhawkupdates] Pre-race from Newport

[Tim Allen GREYHAWK]

In his article previewing the Bermuda 1-2 on Sailing Anarchy last week, Jon Greene tagged me as a new skipper to watch -- one who “shows all the signs of a guy ready, willing and able to win.”

Yeah, right...

While it’s true we’ve had some modest success racing our old boat up in Maine, and I do have several thousands of miles of offshore sailing experience, the fact is that I can count on one hand (with a finger left over) the number of times that I have taken GREYHAWK out sailing single-handed, solo, all by myself.... One of those sails was just this morning!

So in some important ways, racing to Bermuda single-handed is a big step up from what I’ve done in the past. A bit daunting I guess, but for some of the old hands at this race, "it's just another boat trip to Bermuda..." I find it best in cases like this to set low expectations -- that way it’s easier to exceed them! My goal for this race is simply to sail the course in good style and get to Bermuda in one piece. Not finishing last would be nice, and a podium finish would be incredible, but just finishing will be the real treat.

There are 6 boats in Class 3, and Greyhawk is the scratch boat, meaning that I am the fastest rated boat in the class. This means that I should (theoretically) be sailing ahead of the other boats in the class (hopefully you’ll see that on the tracker!), but I owe all of them time so I have to make sure that I am far enough ahead if I am to win. If the race takes me 120 hours (5 days), it looks like I will have to finish more than an 70 minutes ahead of Beau Blue, 2-1/2 hours ahead of Agressive, 3 hours ahead of Cordelia and Palangi, and over 4 hours ahead of Island Girl in order to beat them. 

The first boats to start (Class 1) will cross the line at 11:00 tomorrow. Class 3 will start at 11:20. The iBoat trackers supposedly went live this afternoon, so you should now be able to see all the boats hanging out in Newport. The mooring I am on is pretty far away from the NYC, so you should be able to pick me out from the rest of the fleet pretty easily.

>From the weather briefing at the skipper’s meeting this afternoon, it appears that we should have north-west winds much of the way, so it will be largely a downwind run along the rhumb line. The Jet Stream in going to be stalled in a deep trough, with the west limb right over the race course, pinned by a blocking high in the north Atlantic. But the upper level winds are converging, which has the potential to drive gusts down to the surface. It’s pretty gusty here now, blowing a bit over 20 knots -- hopefully this will settle down over the next day -- that’ll make it a bit easier running under my big masthead symmetrical spinnakers.... The Gulf Stream is setting up to be just a cross current perpendicular to the rhumb line, with an opportunity for a push from a favorable meander after we’ve crossed the main belt of the stream. There doesn’t appear to be much advantage right now to deviating far from the rhumb line. (Of course all this will change for the race back to Newport in two weeks....)

That's it for now.

Best,

Tim Allen
GREYHAWK

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