2015 Campaign

Campaigning for the 2015 AZAB Race & Rolex Fastnet Race

Tuesday 25 August 2015

Fastnet 2015

Our final position in the 2015 Fastnet race was 55th in IRC overall.  Given that we had rounded the Rock itself ranked 99th we made huge gains on the way back.  Sadly we had lost out in the light winds around Portland, a set back that we never really recovered from.  We are pleased with our overall performance given that this was a new experiment with a reduced crew of four.  In particular we enjoyed the chase, hunting down the pack from Scillies to the finish at Plymouth, under A3 and then A2 with spinnaker staysail set.

With the increasing popularity of Jangada on Facebook it is likely that our future blogs will migrate to that platform.  To keep up to date with our antics please go to www.facebook.com/groups/jangada.racing/

Many thanks to you all for your ongoing support.

Richard



Regards,

Richard Palmer



Tuesday 18 August 2015

"silonce finis"

After almost 48 hours of "radio silence" from us on Jangada I am pleased
to report that all is well as we round the Scillies. The race so far
has been challenging with lots of concentration in the light winds. The
tactical decisions around where the wind might be, using all available
info - AIS tracks on the plotter, Yellow Brick tracking when mobile
signal permits & mark-one eye ball with boats around.

One tool in our kit, the iridium satelitte phone, had let us down making
it almost impossible to connect, download data and track boats. However
we think we have resolved the problem. Our hypothesis is that one of
our PC applications which has some very large files loaded is hogging
the processor and upsetting the network handshaking over iridium.

We are looking out at boats around us, ranging from a 57' Class 1 to a
classic S&S yawl in Class 4. This is far from a normal Fastnet with the
tide gates and light/variable winds mixing up the fleets. With wind
forecast to build from the west we are looking a reasonably quick fetch
to the Fastnet Rock with our ETA late Wednesday morning.

Richard