An email from skipper Simeon Tienpont

At 11.11 CEST we received an email in Dutch from skipper Simeon Tienpont, below an elaboration of this email in English.

“It’s day three onboard the Team Childhood. In the last hour, I finally found time to write this short email. We’re heading toward Cabo Gata now. Cabo Gata is near Almeria. On the south-eastern tip of Spain. We must get around there on our way to Alicante. 

From the start, it was full-on. Both to make the boat go fast and to position ourselves in the desired tactical position. Quite a challenge, especially with the unstable weather. We’re relatively heavy compared to the other teams. We’re with 14 onboard while they sail with 10. Because we’re heavier every movement and weight shift is very important. If we have enough pressure in the sails, like at the start of the leg, it’s in our advantage. We can have more weight on the high side, but at times with less wind, such as in the past two nights, we need to work extra hard to keep the boat up to speed.

We knew that in advance, and we consciously chose to sail with 14 persons. So, we’re not complaining and must deal with it. The aim of this campaign is to enable the next generation, the young professionals, to gain as much as experience as possible. That’s happening. There is a lot of rotation on the different positions in a watch. Everyone drives, everyone trims and we’re doing many sail changes.

We have made huge steps forward as a team since the start of the first leg. Except for a few minor flaws, we are now sailing the boat well and as fast as she can. For the past two nights, we chose to be the most southerly positioned boat. The expectations were that we would have the best wind and that we could benefit from a more favorable wind direction. According to the weather models and our routing software, we were in the right place every time, but expectations turned out differently. In practice, the boats north of us were getting more wind every time.

Result: they were able to sail a shorter route and we had to try to keep up with them in the outer corner instead of catching up with them. If we would have the 3 knots more wind as predicted we would have succeeded, but that doesn’t count and now it became very difficult.

Let’s see what the night ahead will bring. The forecasts sailing into Alicante are looking very light again, it’s expected that the entire fleet will reunite. Just like at the finish in Cascais. In the meantime, we continue to work hard to keep in touch with the leaders in the fleet. We may be able to pull something out of our bag of tricks before the finish. The atmosphere on board is good and everyone fights like a Dutch(Sail) lion.

Simeon”