Packed up the gear yesterday and watched as the front came through the race village bringing torrential rain, which gave everybody a good soaking.
However this morning, is race day and the breeze is kicking in and we have clear blue skies, so it should be a really bright fast start out of Alicante for the first leg.
It could be westerly or northwesterly to start with 20 knots of wind and flat water and we should get a rapid start down the coast with a beam reach we should be absolutely flying but as we turn the south east corner of Spain it will be on the nose and windy, may be 30-40 knots. It is 180 miles to the corner and we should get there very quickly but it looks like a very rough first night, potentially boat breaking stuff, it will be blowing hard on the nose so we will be taking it a bit easier. However we could make Gibraltar 24 hours after the start, which is a fast run out of the Med, especially as 200 miles of it will be on the wind.
You don’t want to be delayed getting out of the Gibraltar but it is looking complicated in the Atlantic at the moment, we are hoping that the weather picture for the Atlantic Trade Winds will sort out over the next day or so and we will ‘get on our bike’ so to speak.
We haven’t looked at the weather much further but it looks like 18-20 days before we will be in Cape Town.
All the best,
Rob