Although a little longer than a sprint, this relatively short race to China’s Olympic sailing city of Qingdao had many challenges, from negotiating busy shipping lanes and fishing fleets, to variable weather and strong currents. There was a handover of Dare To Lead – Liyaba ambassadors with Adams Desmond joining, a young man who lives in a small town just outside Durban in South Africa. He said: “If you pitch up and give everything you have, no matter what happens, we are all hear to learn, not only sailing, but to overcome the challenge together.”
Despite a good start to the race AQP Charlie Warhurst described the ‘chaos of darkness’ which engulfed them all: “It was fishing boats galore, with the surprise appearance of a drilling platform being towed too, that we had to tack behind! It's safe to say it's not been a gentle easing into it. We are beating into wind that's growing ever stronger and the green monster is understandably rearing its nasty head, but everyone is pushing through it, and hoping he disappears sooner rather than later.”
The next few days proved to be a game of tacking up inshore to try and avoid some of the swell and gain more favourable winds before heading down through the Ocean Sprint and nipping in tight past Taiwan.
Skipper Ryan Gibson picked up the story a few days into Race 9: “It's been very challenging… doing 150 tacks into the wind and a nasty choppy swell. Wind has followed us not as predicted in the forecast, to an extent that it's literally coming from where we want to go all the time, regardless of our positioning. Once we round the bottom of Taiwan, it will certainly be a relief.”
Despite this, the team worked hard to make ground and get ‘back in the mix.’ They caught up nicely, choosing an inside route to transit the east coast of Taiwan. But unfortunately, this didn't pay off, so the front boats got stronger winds and took off, creating a big 100 nautical mile gap. Ryan reflected: “Sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn't. It's frustrating and you do feel the pressure of choosing the best routing as the Skipper, however that's sailing, and it's never over until you cross the Finish Line.”
A week into the race and Charlie reported on a couple of difficult days following some nightmare sail damage. He explained: “Our Yankee 3 broke free from its sheets, while going upwind in 30 knots. You never really realise the power these sails have until one gets loose. It was only whipping round for maybe 20 seconds, but in that time, it had enough energy to whip into our stall and rip a 1.5-metre hole into it.
“Although nobody was hurt, you always feel it in your hearts when you have to take sails down because you damaged them. This meant that as the wind was dying, we were missing one of our most important sails and had to downsize and use our storm jib as a staysail. Later to add insult to injury, when preparing our Yankee to come out we found a smaller rip in that also! Likely getting caught on sharp hanks through tacks and gybes.
“This meant that while everyone else was likely sailing at eight to ten knots with good angles, we were restricted to flying our two smallest headsails making less way upwind, as we were pushed sideways by our unbalanced sail plan… Not all is lost though, we were shocked to see in the position reports we got through, that we weren’t losing nearly as much ground as we were expecting, and thanks to our amazing sail repair team headed by Retief, with a huge help from Peter Lamond too, they’ve been working round the clock to get our staysail back in shape, and after only 23 hours we had her back up and flying!
“Moods have lifted with our pace, and for an extra treat, we’ve even had some blue skies and sun this morning. Despite our bad luck, we’re still defiantly not down and out and we won't be giving up anytime soon.”
Conditions improved for the closing stages of the race and spirits were high despite being further back in the fleet. Ryan described the scene: “the Sun is shining, music is playing, the spinnaker is flying, and yes, we are going downwind until the finish which is a fresh change to all the upwind sailing and banging! It's been a tough race for us, but I'm extremely happy with how the team has dealt with it and kept motivated and driving until this point… as I tell my crew we will be finished when we cross the finish line, anything can happen.
“We are all looking forward to experiencing the huge welcome Qingdao is renowned for, exploring the city a bit and most importantly getting some quality rest before the biggest, and most important race of this circumnavigation across to Seattle.”
However, the team bagged enough points to retain second place overall, now 8 points behind Perseverance and 6 points ahead of Zhuhai. Dare To Lead is geared up for the return to big ocean racing and the North Pacific presents an exciting new chapter in this challenging marathon around our planet. Bring on Race 10!
