Big thank you to Eden Capital for supporting our entry in the ROLEX Sydney to Hobart race 2023. Our team at Eden Capital shares my appetite for challenge, exploration, the power of mindset, and the value of doing things differently.
A few pictures below of the race - only 2 of us on board Cinnamon Girl. The helicopter photos are of myself, probably 20 minutes before the wind rose to +45 knot gusts and the growing waves breaking over the boat knocked out our electrics. I wrote a small blog on the experience - a short excerpt below and link to it also below. Thanks again to Cian McCarthy for being an exceptional teammate and driving force, my family and Eden Capital for the great support. Sailing is a wonderful sport for a bit of adventuring and can be taken up at any stage/age! Seasickness does not rule you out... I get it too.
"Thankfully the water breaking over the boat is warm ~18C around Sydney. But the constant wetness gets at you, the temperatures drop as you head South to Hobart, and in this year's race, into worsening weather. Despite dry suits and good offshore weather gear, we were both suffering cold fatigue by end of Day 3, and with the boat totally sodden below deck, sleeping becomes difficult/inadvisable as you will get too cold. But at that stage, with less than 24 hours to go, you manage without the sleep.
By Tasman Island (the furthest Southerly point of race), we had one quite major issue. The main cockpit hatch seal had not been keeping water out throughout the race and breaking waves on deck frequently seeped down below. This ramped up significantly by Tasman Island with the big breaking seas (6 mtr waves), and we had circa 350 liters of water down below deck, which was helping to send the boat more sideways than forward in the bigger gusts. The electric bilge pump was not working, and much of the water was below floorboards that were screwed down, so you couldn't get a pipe in to pump it out. While we were not in immediate danger, unfortunately with no windward water ballast to counteract, it meant we lost a lot of time to other competitors going to windward, most of whom had positive righting water ballast unlike us...
In some ways, it felt like a wild day surfing/kitesurfing in Garretstown Beach more than a boat race for a while - this is fine if you are happy to be out there and feel confident, but not so much if you don't. The Red Bulls were cracked open, and we chose to bend our mindset to embrace the extreme conditions and the water/electrics issue. Condition description language was changed onboard from 'horrendous' to 'next level', and we just cracked on, making slow but steady progress to windward up to and around Tasman Island."
Blog: Scroll down 👇https://lnkd.in/ekwpXEVe
