My ‘little’ brother Myles (he is 23 and 6 foot 3!) and I spent a crazy 3 weeks before this race rebuilding Dad’s boat. I got back from Antarctica and the massive job list which was meant to be done over the winter on the boat had not been touched much to my disappointment and dismay. We had run a foul of the STIX number on the boat not being high enough to qualify for the race. However come hell or high water the little Santana was going to race – as far as my family was concerned we knew she was perfect for it. We took 30 kg of lead and bolted it to the keel stepped the mast and put in the rudder and the measured interior. That all sounds easy but the boat was full of fiberglass dust as all the bulkhead tabbing had been done badly by the yard had to be ground out. At a quiet marina in the River Hamble we had a ORC measurer do an incline test on her which involved a couple of 2 by 4’s some jerry cans full of water, lots of measuring and spirit levels! On tender hooks all weekend we awaited the numbers from the ORC office and low and behold we had a boat that was stable enough to do the race. Mast came back down, rudder came back out, interior stripped again and work commenced at full tilt with many of Myles’s friends coming down and putting in a few hours here and there doing what they could on the boat. Meanwhile Myles wrote 1000’s of words for his Masters and I had to go back to San Francisco to see my clients I had neglected for 8 months. The job list seemed more extensive than Ocean Planets during the Around Alone!

The boat is a Capo 30 my father bought in 2000 in Detroit and shipped it to the UK. Carl Schumacher who designed the boat was a family friend and before the Capo we had an Express 27 in the UK. Built at Westerly in 1984 she has become a bit of an anomaly with an Alan Andrews keel (now extended), a Merf Owen rudder, and some structural engineering done by the South African America’s Cup team allowing us to open up some bulkheads down below for easier access into the aft bunks. We are the smallest boat in the race little Santana is doing her original designer and everyone since proud.

If you had seen Santana a week before the race you would think there was no way she was going to be at the start especially as we still had a 300 mile qualifier to do. Indeed Pip who is winning the race overall (in another Carl Schumacher boat) commented to her friends that she didn’t think we would make it. She didn’t know then like she does now about how the Perrin family operates.

My boyfriend Clive was dragged over from Northern Ireland and spent 6 sixteen hour days with power tools, my mother wandered around the boat with a Henry the vacumn cleaner trying to get rid of fiberglass dust and kept the troops happy with food and drinks. My father ran around picking up parts and pieces around Hampshire and further. A sample of what we did during those 2 weeks to comply with Cat 2 regs and for the boat to be structurally capable ….
– Installed Hydra 3000 instruments (we have only ever had depth and log) including a whole new wiring harness in the rig
– Rewired the entire boat
– Installed VHF, GPS with DSC, AIS Class B, stereo with speakers, computer with navigation software
– Cut out over 2 feet of rotten balsa core around the mast partners and rebuilt the area and more core around stanchion bases
– New lifelines and stanchions which we also moved out to the side and backed with G10 plates (everything had to be epoxy plugged)
– Completely retabbed the entire boat and scarfed in new marine ply where the chainplate bulkheads had rottened out including building foam knees for additional support and glassing that in
– Rebuilt the companionway hatch so the liferaft could be stowed up top
– Replumbed the stove so the shut off valve could be accessed without leaning over the flame!
– Put latches on the engine cover and hatches, tied down the batteries
– Installed my Dad’s tiller pilot from the 80’s which is useless and has already died
– Melted down the lead to shape for the keel extension bolted it on and faired it in
– Wet sanded the bottom and repainted the keel and rudder with orange antifoul
– Rebuilt the winches, serviced the engine, sent the sails off for some repairs
– Installed a new rod rigging backstay, forestay and tuff luff
– Painted our sail numbers on deck and on the side of the boat

So everything needed doing from the top of the rig to the bottom of the keel to be ready for what I consider one of the seven summits of offshore sailing the list went on and on. While Myles and I did the qualifier my mother cooked up a storm in the kitchen making us homemade meals and treats which we could reheat in the pressure cooker and Dad booked all the ferries to act as a support team.

We are all set to leave the dock tomorrow at 9 am race starts at 12:15 and it looks like a light air beat to the Scillies then a run across the Irish Sea. If we are too slow we will be drifting and then beating to the finish late on tuesday so we are hoping for some good wind to get us to Kinsale. The long range forcast shows us in 25-30 knots on the nose going up the west coast of Ireland end of next week. We have been desperately trying to get our computer to work on the boat to no avail so my personal computer will be coming with us – though it is at 100% of the CPU useage. So a day of being a computer geek while finishing off the hatch rebuild to store our liferaft. My mother spent the last week making tasty food for us with lots of treats – brownies, muffins etc. Dad has been running around collecting parts and pieces for us so Team Perrin is all ready for the race to begin and to start enjoying the experience. I personally am looking forward to Kinsale as Clive will be coming down to see me for the stop over and there is also a great steak restuarant we are all going to visit!

Follow us on the tracker at http://www.rbandi.com/tracking/ we are Santana

Myles and I will be raising money for St Margarets Somerset Hospice where our Uncle John was admitted yesterday. Please support us while we race Around Britain and Ireland.

http://www.justgiving.com/TeamPerrin

We are tied up in Plymouth having got here at 3am this morning and it is beautiful weather amazingly! We managed to travel 310 miles for our qualifier by sailing out the eastern solent on sunday over to Cherbourg along the French coast back to the English coast out to Eddystone light and finally into Queen Anne’s Battery in Plymouth.

The last week and half have been an enormous amount of work including finish fairing the keel which we added some 30kg+ of lead to in order to pass the STIX requirements for the race. We also rewired the boat, put in a B and G H3000 system, finished re building the chainplate bulkheads which had rottened out. Basically a lot of things which normally would be sorted this close to the race! However, with the help of many of Myles’s friends and Clive and by doing multiple 14 hour days here we are with another three pages of jobs to get done by Sunday when the race starts!

So enough writing I am off for a shower and then will start on the job list.

After a few days in Ireland including walking in the mountains of mourne I flew back to San Francisco to a wedding and a mound of paperwork.

Looking forward to friday night racing tomorrow, the wedding on saturday and a week filled with fun working on a few boats. Life is somewhat going back to normal. The garage was a nightmare today trying to find offshore kit for the round britain race. Life is not as simple these days 🙂

Yeoman XXXII on the front page of the RORC 2010 Program – picture taken at the start of the Caribbean 600 in February 2009.

Bruce Stone who hires RYM to look after his boats on the east and west coast of America and also to race with him in match racing events was awarded St Francis Yacht Club Male Sailor of the Year.

Genny Tulloch who I had the pleasure of sailing with in the Great Lakes on the Elliott 6m was awarded St Francis Yacht Club Female Sailor of the Year.

Congratulations all of you for a great 2009 season. See you in a few months 🙂

Last week Myles and I went to Malta to race on Hooligan VI a Farr 40 in the Rolex Middle Sea Race. Although we did not win the race or actually do that well we did finish which is better than 30 or so other boats and we had an interesting race.

The course is 605 miles or so long but with the beating legs that of course makes the course longer. It takes you from Malta up to Sicily and around the north side and then around several islands including the active volcano of Stromboli returning to Malta. Interestingly you get very close to the Libyan waters and can see the glow of Libya in the night. You also go past Mt Etna on Sicily – who knew that it was snow capped!

Photo credit: Rolex / Kurt Arrigo
The start and finish is in the Harbor with the start in Grand Harbor under the shadow of Fort Elmo and the Venice like city of Valletta (the city planned and built 450 years ago by the Knights of the Order of St John). The starting gun was not diminutive in fact it was a massive signal cannon which is traditionally fired at midday. There was a crowd lining the curtain walls of Valletta and Vittisoria (one of the three cities) the most people I have ever seen interested in a yacht race with the small boats starting first in a light breeze.

The weather during the race was varied we saw 2-42 knots and there were races within the race which if you were able to shift gears quickly meant you did well. At night the combination of the cold northerlies and the very warm sea water created an environment for squalls, water spouts and large thunderheads. These were incredibly hard to see or anticipate as there was no moon. The squalls hit fast and hard so it was necessary to become very fast and at throwing reefs in and out and taking down spinnakers as the wind direction would shift dramatically. These micro systems brought hail (I am not kidding) and rain that stung on impact making it hard to see. The nights were extremely long with 13 hours of darkness putting an emphasis on organization for the night period like the necessity to tag reef lines in and out – reef one to reef three etc.

At one point the number one reef line came out of the boom entirely luckily when the sun came up there was 10 knots of wind so we were able to tag out the second reef and use it to tag in both reefs. It did necessity the removal of the sheaves in the aft of the boom which with a cat’s cradle of line we were able to do without dropping the main but required quite a lot of balancing. Once that was repaired we started to become competitive about how quickly we could throw reefs in and out with 3 or 4 people on deck. The best time was around 1 minute which meant on our last ¼ mile to the finish inside the harbor meant we only lost ½ a boat length when it came to shaking out the reef! The hardest process is the fact that the main halyard is clutched down below on the Farr 40 so you have to rig up a block to get it up on deck to a primary winch. We ended up at night leaving it off the clutch and on a winch on deck so we could react quicker however, this left lines that people tripped over.

We had a few other gear issues including the chafing through of the cover on the jib halyard requiring Myles to go up and resolve the problem and I repaired the halyard. The main winches on a Farr 40 are under sized which puts a load onto the brass pawl housing creating ovalling and end result is the winches were back winching (not terribly safe). As a result we had to tie off one end of the sheet and cross sheet on starboard tack to the primary with the mainsheet. It is so important on a Farr 40 to be able to trim the main continuously. The speedo stopped working about 100 miles from the finish meaning the instruments basically were useless. After the speedo was removed checked and returned to the housing we had some excitement when we had an internal 4 foot waterspout after the speedo blew out – obviously it had not been put back correctly. Lots of bailing later the boat was no longer sinking!

The crew was all very nice people with 3 students taking a lot of the weight of sail changes and general running around trying to make the boat fast. Our navigator an ex merchant seaman is very English and was constantly brewing tea sometimes twice per watch – I did find it a little hard to deal with when we had four on deck and all their hands were needed but instead mugs were being clutched. I can see this is a great morale raiser in the cold English Channel conditions. I did have a chuckle when at three am upon waking for watch I was quizzed about where the teaspoon might have disappeared to as it is ‘jolly hard to make tea with a dessert spoon”! We used the boil in the bag camping food and it was not bad at all with the Hot Pot winning the trophy for the best tasting. I don’t think you want to see what it looks like though it is much better to just eat it in the darkness ?

The ‘kids’ efforts combined with a 3 hour on and off watch system meant I got quite a lot of rest in comparison to the Caribbean 600! So although we did have gale force conditions they didn’t last long and life was not that uncomfortable. The boat was a lot drier than the IRC 46 however, I would have preferred to have my Kokotat drysuit as I am in love with it and don’t like getting wet.

The last 30 miles we match raced two other boats with the local Maltese knowledge helping them to gain on us dramatically on the way up the Maltese coast. The kids really got into trimming the boat constantly and with everyone on the rail the boat was sailed at a lot higher percent of its potential. Three boats finished within a minute of each other with us the middle boat doing an interesting method of tacking with two winches that didn’t work.

So all in all a fun race with amazing scenery and good company.

I had a great time on the Quest 33 going down to Half Moon Bay this weekend. We rounded the mark ahead of some much larger boats and it took them the whole way down the coast to catch us up. We went rhumb line and lost 1st place at the very end when the wind died even more to 3.6knots and went dead behind. All the depth we had gained by sailing deeper than everyone else we lost as they pulled their poles back and headed downwind while we had to heat it up to keep us moving due to the swell pushing us around. All in all a beautiful sunny day on the water ending in a 3 place with first and second correcting out exactly the same only about a minute ahead of us.

I got back from Sheboygan yesterday where I took part in the US Olympic Match Racing Team training session on the new Elliott 6m. This was the first time these boats have been launched in the US the first 8 out of the factory are in Europe. The boats are a massive change from the J22, J24, Catalina 37, Sonars etc that are currently being used in match racing events throughout the country. They are keelboats that act like dinghies and have to be sailed like dinghies in order to be sucessful. The narrow foils mean that it is going to get interesting for the teams when they get into down speed maneouvres and will put a large emphasis on boat handling. The boats slide sideways until the flow attaches to the foils to create the lift. There is no backstay and the main is very large the spinnakers are relatively big and the jibs are small. The weight limit is 450lbs and the team has to be at weight and everyone needs to be able to hike hard.

It was interesting to get back into match racing after a 6 year hiatus and see how the discipline has changed maybe as a results of it becoming an olympic class. The average age of the women sailing is a lot lower and they almost all come from collage sailing backgrounds. So I was straight away at a disadvantage having stopped sailing dinghies when I was 12 years old!! They can roll tack like no tomorrow and seem to have thighs of steel when hiking out! The boats are very powered up requiring full on hiking using the hiking straps in 8 knots of wind. After a few days of sailing them I put together a few notes on things I would change on the layout side of things and hardware choices which I am sure will not be looked at but I always enjoy trying to dream up easier layouts etc.

I was sailing with Genny Tulloch who was very patient with me and really enjoyed learning from Dave Perry and Vince Brun. The guys worked very hard at the sailing center to get the boats out of customs and their containers and into the water so they could be sailed. Believe me I know how much work was involved in just putting the boats together. So all in all a great learning experience and now it is time to concentrate on my next adventure which kicks off it 3 1/2 weeks.

Yesterday we raced the sonars and ended up only finishing two round robins for the event with no time for finals or petite finals. We were given the opportunity to come first when one of the other teams beat the Brazilians who led us by one point. All we had to do was beat the Brazilians..

We gave them a penalty in the pre start and held them off till the last 1/2 of the last upwind when they got past us and were able to clear their penalty. We had some exciting matchs with some close finishes the leads changed due to large shifts on the courses. The fog line was about a quarter mile away so generally when the wind was shifting left you would feel cold air from the lake and when it shifted right it was warm air.

So we ended up in second place for the regatta. Now onto training with the US Olympic Team on the new Elliott 6m’s which are being launched for the first time in the US. There is an amazing line up of coaches – Vince Brun and Dave Perry with all their experience and great coaching abilities.

See Team Brickhouse website for Kristen Lane (the skipper I sailed with) write up on the event.