The race has now been going on for 25 days - which is why I stopped doing an update every day a while ago. Here's what happened since I last updated you on the progress of the yacht Hold The Mayo.

I was making good progress recovering from my disastrous turn south and even though the first place boat arrived in Cape Town while I was over a thousand miles away I was making steady and consistent progress back up the standings. I was very close to being better than 2000th place.

Then something bad happened.

I broke my light spinnaker. I had been using this sail a lot since I left Spain 25 days ago and I guess it just wore out. The game did not give any clue that the sail was in danger. I just woke up one morning and found that it had broken during the night. Sailing for however many hours with a broken sail is what in sailing parlance we call "slow."

There is a feature in the game that will let you use points to repair a sail. To get the points, you have to buy them and I made the decision from the beginning that I was going to do this without spending a dime.

I still have the heavy spinnaker and have been using that extensively. You just don't go as fast with the heavy spinnaker. This disaster set me back to 3624th place. I have been battling my way back slowly and am as of this moment at 3154.

I have 417 miles to the finish. I am in good position with a good wind forecast for a straight shot into Cape Town. If I keep passing boats I have a decent chance of finishing better than 3000th. Out of a fleet of now over 50,000 boats I guess I can live with that. Of course as the boats converge on the finish there is a chance that I could pass huge numbers of boats or be passed by huge numbers of boats.

We shall see.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 09:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment