It was certainly exciting with the sails bulging, a significant lean to the ship, and we were enjoying good speeds up to 11 knots (Sørlandet's top speed ever was 14 knots I believe)
But as far as the race was concerned, whether more wind was good or not depends on a variety of things.... as the wind grew stronger it was also pushing us over creating drag and some of the top sails had to be taken in. I suppose at some point too much lean is also dangerous for tipping over. The other 'problem' with more wind was that other ships often had the same wind and they could go faster too! Our rival Christian Radich is a longer hulled ship with more sail and so could use stronger winds better while Sørlandet could use smaller winds better. This is not necessarily a problem as the race is based on time, rather than physically first over the line, and there are handicaps given to each ship based on things like it's hull length, amount of sail, size of propeller (drag) etc.
Regardless, each watch we had to make the best of the weather and we regularly tweaked the sails to get the best out of each change of heading, current or wind.
Strong winds are not to be taken lightly and must be managed well by a ships crew... we later found out that some ships had suffered structural damage during the race, including one ship that had lost all three masts!!! From our perspective on Sørlandet, it's hard to imagine what it would take to cause such significant damage, but thankfully it didn't happen to us!
No comments:
Post a Comment