33:27.91N 62:48.22W

After five enjoyable days in Bermuda it was finally time to leave. The Rally start was scheduled for midday inside the harbour so we slipped our lines at 10am so that we could have a couple of hours practicing our strategy for the start. The wind was about 8 knots on a beam reach so we decided to bring out the big guns. Our code zero with is a 150% genoa, we decided that we would time our start to perfection and drift to the line and then pop the code zero on the start line.

Well “all well laid plans and all”, what we hadn’t factored into our masterplan was 30 boats all approaching the narrow Ton Cut out of the harbour with limited manoeuvrability, we tore down towards the Cut other boats who had crossed the line were not going quite as fast as us and were four abreast with no opportunity to overtake so we risked shunting them so we had to let the code zero fly to reduce speed and ram the engine into reverse to avoid a collision.

Once out of the Cut things didn’t get better as the wind was gusting outside the harbour and we were hopelessly overpowered so we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and we rolled him up and put him away for another day, all whilst watching the fleet disappear into the distance.

We did restore order and raise our trade wind sail, a slightly smaller genoa and we did manage to catch the fleet and indeed started overtaking quite a few boats as the wind died which favoured our lightweight sail.

During the evening the winds continued to fall and by 9:30pm we had given up and engaged the motor which then continued for much of the night. The forecast was for the wind to come round early in the morning and it did just that and as I write now at 8:30am we are making 7.5 knots on a north easterly course up to 38 degrees latitude before heading east for the Azores.

It’s good to be back at sea again and we are gradually get back into rhythm again