Day 1 – Saturday 4 January 2014

By Grant Chapman.

After a reasonable start to the race, albeit a bit low down the start line as we were unsure which class we belonged to, we had to tack up to buoy 1 at Granger Bay and just managed to round it with centimeters to spare. We then hoisted the big purple scouts branded spinnaker and set sail for buoy 2 at Milnerton lighthouse. We held our own all the way to buoy 2 in front of the racing catermerans fleet until approaching the buoy we had the squeeze put on both our boat and the cat Windgat by a big catermeran on a starboard tack that was forcing us off the lay line as both our boats were on a port tack. Windgat very sensibly tacked to starboard and in doing so forced the big cat off, allowing us to round buoy 2 very well, getting the inside edge ahead of all the cats and thereafter beating up to buoy 3 off Blaauwberg where we delayed tacking until close to the shore so that we could get a good angle and round this buoy more easily. Off we then went on a westerly bearing en route to Rio.

The Cape Peninsula was spectacular in the late afternoon viewed in her full length from out at sea opposite the 12 Apostles and we only lost sight of her numerous city lights at about 10pm. It was a tough sail beating in a north westerly wind across the swell but we needed this routing to avoid the impending storm that we had seen developing on the weather forecasts. First light was very bumpy against a 4m swell and everyone spent the first night getting fairly soaked in the spray off the top of the waves. Marcus commented that he was surprised at how pretty his regurgitated stomach contents were every time they hit the ocean. The rest of the crew pointed out that this was actually phosphorescence caused by organisms in the sea. A boat rule was that we had to be wearing our PFDs and tethered to the boat with lines during any rough weather or if we were working on the fore deck and always at night.