St Lucia
WE MADE IT, 3250 nm in 16 Days.

Due to our weather router Erik we had the best wind conditions in the fleet. The wind was mostly from southeast at 20-35 kn and we had an average speed of 8kn. Unfortunately did we rip our 3 spinnackers (2 reapairs) thus we ripped a total of 5 times of wich the last one was most spectacular since we made a Picture Frame.

The brakdown uf the spinnackers slowed us down and I suppose we could a have made it 1 day shorter with proper spinnackers. It should also be noted that our sister ship Mustang dismasted at the first spreader. There was a lot of damage also to the hull since it took a while to cut down the shrouds. We also saw Luffe 44 that was dismasted.

We had great sailing in rather tough conditions with lots of wind and giant swells. It was a amazing feeling to race down the swell with a 60 ton boat. The nights where spectacular with moonshine that made it as light as if it was in the day.

In summary the sailing was above my expectations, but it was a big disapointment to miss the start. The final blow was when we came here to St Lucia and tha harbour entrance was to shallow and we had to ancor outside. We could finally make it to port on the 15th at high tide.

BUT we had lots of breakdowns:

Steering
SSB Radio
12 V
24 V (forcing us to sail at night without navigation lights)
Inverters
Aux engine
Water maker
Frige
Freezer
Running Backstays (very dangerous)
Vang
Spinnackers
Pulpit
Halyards
Winches
Wind Instruments

Fortunately where not all breakdowns the same day, but it was a constant flow of problems. BUT the mood on the boat was very good everybody worked together to solve the problems, but the water shortage mede us all smell pretty bad. But it was also funny to see all on deck with shampoo and soap when we got a rainshower. It was even more fun when the rain stopped before you could wash of the soap.............

I will post pictures when I get back to sweden for x-mas.

Thank you Eric for doing the routing for us it made all the difference.

Merry Christmas to all my friends

A note from the shorecrew;

As you all noticed the yellow boat did not join the rest of the ARC fleet for the start on Sunday 26th of November. When they finally got going, two days and some hours behind, it wasn’t exactly in the way they had hoped… After a few hours of sailing, the Creightons got stuck in a wind hole between some canary islands, staying practically still for the rest of that day.
While most other boats headed towards the steady easterly trade winds in the south, the crew of Creightons instead decided to go north as soon as possible, having everything to win!
The reason, trying to catch some tempting leftovers from an old low pressure which should get the 80 footer flying, and of course passing the rest of the ARC fleet. With the aid of a weather routing programme, we found the optimal route from the Canaries to Saint Lucia (figure below).
Today, December 3rd, we see on the ARC-web page that Creightons is positioned right at the northernmost tip of the proposed optimal route (black curve in the fig.), so it seems like they have stuck to the plan. The boat is sailing in some good breeze at this time so hopefully they will gain some on the fleet.

The figure shows an optimal route for Creightons, presented by a weather routing programme. The red curve is the closest route from Gran Canaria to Saint Lucia. The black curve is the winning course that Creightons will try to sail.


Cheers!
/ Erik Nordborg, Creightons´ shorebased meteorologist.