After 20 days at sea, and some pretty good weather routing between two weather systems, we arrived into a fog bound Cape Town where Alithia will be staying for some down time. This gives the crew a chance to fix the boat after a tough 6500 miles at sea which unfortunately caused some damage. We will be getting all the sails off and serviced, the boat cleaned and all the broken parts mended from the trip. While there we will be lifting her out of the water to replace the thruster door with a new improved stronger solution. We will also have the opportunity to complete repairs to the keel bulb after an unscheduled encounter with the seabed!
After a tough 15 days slogging it out upwind from Antigua to Fernando de Noronha off the Brazilian coast, Alithia has sustained some damage. The bow thruster doow has been ripped off and we have had to get a replacement made in Italy and shipped out so that we can effect a temporary repair before heading off to Cape Town, some 4000 miles away across the Southern Atlantic.
It took two of us repeatedly diving under the bow to remove the old brackets and fix the new door with some locally fabricated brackets in order for us to continue oour journey.
At 13:15 on 17th January, the Royal Navy team of HMS Oardacious crossed the finish line of ‘The Worlds Toughest Row’ across the Atlantic in first place, more than 100 miles ahead of their nearest competitor. They also broke the Military team rowing record for the event by over 12 hours.
I had been involved with the team over the summer, working with them to hone their boat polars which enable me to give them more accurate weather routing. In fact by taking a more extreme route right from the start, which had them in almost last place after the first day, they stuck with my routing plan and trusted in what I was telling them. Two days later they were leading the fleet and extending that lead with every sched that came in.
This year the weather was very unusual, as I had discovered a few weeks ago when I sailed across onboard the 80′ Sailing Yacht ‘Alithia’. The strong trade winds simply were not there and at the western end of the track, usually an area of strong wind, there was in face a large wind hole which needed very careful planning to get through successfully.
In the end though, the team of sun mariners managed to sustain a lead of over 100 miles to the end. Very proud of them, they did exactly as I asked them to do.
A huge achievement by all the teams rowing across, but it was nice to work with another successfull team in this daunting challenge.
After the Champagne Hippy project, I am now off onto another eighty footer, only this time we are off on a circumnavigation.
The plan being to sail the Med this summer, taking in Sardinia, Italy, Sicily, Malta, Croatia and Greece. Then back to Palma for a month yard period before siling down to the Canaries and after a couple of weeks cruising with friends and family of the owners, we sail across to the Caribbean for Christmas and New year
Well here we go again, getting ready to fly out to St Lucia to join Champagne Hippy for a final trip back across the Atlantic before she goes to a new owner in Majorca.
It looks like there will only be 5 of us onboard, Myself, Jake as first mate and (brilliant) engineer, Lee and Guy and we will have Kat looking after us on the crossing.
This may well be my last crossing on Hippy as the new owner currently has no plans to take her back to the Caribbean. In the meantime I have my own boat to deal with – Karelia, a Farr designed beneteau 50 which is currently in Greece. More on this as the story onboard unfolds.
If you want to follow us across the Atlantic on Champagne Hippy, I will as always have my trusty Yellow Brick satellite tracker running. We plan to leave around 17/18 April and it should take about 3 weeks.
To follow us go to http://my.yb.tl/alexalley
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