The last 2 years were really fun and the weather forecast (3 days of 15 to 20 knots) promised for some great North Sea sailing.
At 10 am 12 cats started of towards the first gps waypoint, first of the many to come.
This year the organisation prepared no less then 220 waypoints to guide us along the Belgian and Dutch North Sea coast and Ducth inland waters.
Keywords of the first day: 15 to 20 knots, spinnaker sailing, speed.
In less then 6 hours we covered 70 miles or 130 km! Meaning we ended at the end of the first day just below Rotterdam in Hellevoetsluis.
We had a day of ups and downs with a 1rst and a 3rd, but also with a couple of 7ns...
The warm up of the second day was Rondje Tiengemeten, a yearly long distance race held by the sailing club Hellecat. By 12 we finished the round and were ready to go through the lock out to the sea again. 5 hours of upwind sailing were waiting. Luckily the wind went down to a nice 15 knots after the first hour, so we returned from survival mode to racing mode :-).
We steadily finished around 5th position, but felt we improved during the day as we got more used to sailing with each other.
Finally we ended up at the Roompot in Holland, 110 km from where we started this morning.
On the last day we had no idea what the organisation had still up for us. We were just 2 hours from your club, but imagined they wouldn't just let us sail in like that.
What a great last day we had. After a couple of normal legs, we started of for a 10 mile upwind leg. The whole fleet was very close to each other then entire time. Every 15 minutes the fleet crossed each other, everytime anxious to see if positions had changed. Finally we were able to finish 2nd in this leg, with a finish at the Thorton bank, where they are installing an offshore windfarm at the moment.
Once there we headed back to shore a 17 mile leg! What a great spinnaker run!
I'll still upload the original gps track we sailing if I'm able to download it.
This was the longest extreme we had sailed up to know. The organisation each time knows to surprise us and we'll be competing again next year to defend of final 5th position!