Day 22 – Saturday 25 January 2020
By Nick Chapman and Max Elsworth
We’ve been progressing nicely staying close to the 20 degrees latitude line for the past few days and altering course slightly to optimise our speed with the changing wind which was blowing at between 12 and 15 knots most of the time. Late yesterday we spotted the Ilha da Trindade islands (admittedly from the top of the mast thanks to Ewan and then Josh who went up to confirm it). Although the islands are over 500 miles from the Brazillian coastline it was wonderful to see land for the first time in over 3 weeks.
We then received news of the misfortune of Zulu Girl which is ahead of us and further south getting caught in the LP and experiencing 70 knot winds which apparently broke their rudder steering quadrant lines and caused one of their crew to get a burnt foot from boiling water. They say they are managing fine with their emergency tiller now and are continuing the race with having treated the crew member’s burns. On the latest position report we noticed they were going at only 2 knots given their difficult circumstances on board now. We wish them all the best and hope they are all ok. We are trying to contact them to let them know that we can divert to come and help them in any way if necessary as we should be coming reasonably near to them on our way into Rio.
Given Zulu Girl’s bad luck we realise now why the lead boat Sulanga headed north up the Brazilian coast to avoid the LP as being a catamaran she is more vulnerable to heavy weather like that and it would be terrible if she capsized.
Yesterday was hopefully our last tech-free Sunday at sea (we don’t use any of our mobile devices such as cell phones or tablets etc to play music of games) as we expect to be in Rio some time this weekend if all goes according to plan. Mika and Matt kept us entertained with funny stories while Dom came up with good meal suggestions to keep us occupied. And true to form Daniel managed our day for us with his positive and cheerful manner that has been a real asset on our trip.
In the early hours of this morning we passed Ilha da Trindade and are now heading more south towards Rio, hoping to get good winds which according to our weather routing app should be the case.