Offshore George managed to take a well earned break after finishing the Vendee Globe with Brian Thompson.

He gets itchy feet quickly though and has teamed up with his long time friend Hannah White to keep her company onboard Pure Solo in the OSTAR.

Hannah first met George in 2006 when we decided to send him off on his adventures to raise awareness for the RNLI and she’s been a keen supporter of his adventures ever since.

She even organised for George to summit Kilimanjaro with her father in 2007.

Hannah is competing in the OSTAR in her new boat Pure Solo.  Keep track of her journey in her special reports at ‘Confessions of an Ocean Racer’ or visit her own site at www.hannah-white.co.uk

Image courtesy: www.lightoverwater.co.uk

At 0830hrs on Monday 16 February, Offshore George and a jubilant Brian Thompson crossed the finish line of the 2008/09 Vendee Globe with a total journey time of 98 days, 20h, 29m,55s.

Brian (with the help of his trusty RNLI bear) raced the IMOCA Open 60 ‘Bahrain Team Pindar’ over a total of  28699.8 Nm to gain fifth place, battling for most of the way with electrical and mechanical faults.

The dynamic duo overcame all problems presented to them and kept the boat in one piece when 19 out of the original 30 starters had to abandon the race.

Both are fit and well and are currently enjoying a well deserved pint in Les Sables d’Olonne.

Congratulations to both for a job well done!

Hello there!

Here are some shots of George in strong winds, taking us towards the Horn. He is doing a very professional job, no complaining, just gets on with any task he is given!

Look forward to talking soon!

Brian

George and brian are currently near the corner of Brazil and are in 6th place with Dee Caffari breathing down their necks some 40 miles behind.

Another incredible action filled day on Bahrain Team Pindar.

After the repairs had been finished at dawn yesterday, I slowly started sailing and the boat was going fine, ahead of the cold front in 40-50 knots of wind and the repair was holding. The cold front arrived just after dawn this morning and it was quite an unusual one, with the wind dropping and going into the west (which is normal), but then going into the south and blowing at 30 knots, which was not on any of the weather charts, and was a very big shift. This was a critical test for the repairs as the seas were shocking at this point, with the two differing wind directions and the boat was doing some serious slamming. I was so glad of the calm weather I had to do the repair properly; otherwise this would have been a bad place to be with a broken boat.

Then the wind turned more SW and kept on increasing until it was a steady 50-60 knots for hour after hour. The seas were starting to build and the pilot was not liking the way the stern was getting thrown around by the mainsail. One thing that the design office had said was that extreme rudder load transfers through the boat to that front longitudinal would work it hard, so all things considered I decided to take the main down till the wind had subsided. I was in a tiny low that had formed on the cold front, just at the time I was there, and so slowing a little would allow the bad weather to track east faster relative to my movement.

So I tried to get the mainsail lowered going downwind, it was not budging, so I turned onto a reach in 55 knots and let the halyard down, it moved – but just a tiny bit. I was going to have to climb on the boom and pull the luff down by hand. This was a massive effort, but I eventually got it down, inch by inch. Whenever I let go of the sail it would shoot up again, so it was 2 steps forward, and one step back to get the sail down. By the time I got back to the cockpit my finger tips were in pain from both the cold and clawing the sail down. I felt a bond with those common seamen standing on the yards of their square riggers, fighting to get the sails shortened on to the yards.

Once I got the main down the boat was very happy, more in control and still hitting 17/18 knots of speed easily. Taking the main down is not something I like to do, as it can be a real bear to get the sail up again. As it is proving ….

I used the opportunity to get a little sleep, and to attempt a video conference call with APP as it was constantly over 50 knots. By then it was getting dark, and the wind had dropped enough to try to raise the main. But I soon saw that the leeward lazy had broken and I would have to go up the mast to run a new lazyjack, not too high, maybe 8 metres, and then put up the mainsail. I was certain I could not get this all done by dark and it’s too tricky an operation to raise the main on your own in 35 knots without being able to see what is happening. So I decided to put up a bigger headsail and tidy up the boat, so that I am ready for the morning, when the wind and seas should be lighter too. I am glad that I made that choice as, in going round the boat, I saw that the force of the sea had dislodged both the man overboard module and the liferaft from the stern. The liferaft was just attached by its painter, so I was pretty close to seeing it inflate and be dragged off behind the boat. Fortunately, we all have another liferaft, but this is the better one of the two. Its now safely lashed at the front of the cockpit and I will have to tell the race committee that the seal on the liferaft is broken.

It is unsurprising that 60 knots is not good for the speed or for reliability. I really had not expected this much wind, but again, its all part of the rich experience of the Vendee Globe race. So I am stuck for a few Christmas Eve hours going slowly.

George is on galley duty.  Its rumoured that he makes a wicked bread sauce…

Worked all night last night to get the repair finished, building additions to the beam going forwards with more floorboards and a final lamination of carbon cloth and epoxy resin. This will hold the tank lid down to the repaired longitudinal to create an I beam to take the loads from the floor of the boat.

I was working as fast as possible as I knew a big low was coming at 35 knots from behind. I had to get the lamination cured before the boat started wracking and slamming in the waves, as any movement would ruin the lamination. In the end I was sitting in the forepeak at dawn with a gas stove in each hand, heating each side of the repair to make the epoxy go off more quickly, feeling the boat start to move in the increased sea state from the 20 knots of wind that had already arrived.

Once the lamination was mostly cured, after 3 hours of holding the gas burners and trying to stay awake, I finally left the forepeak and collapsed onto a beanbag to sleep for 2 whole, fantastic hours. I have hardly slept for 3 days and was running on adrenaline and the fear of this Vendée Globe adventure ending, or being stranded in a storm with a broken boat. There were a lot of incentives to get it done, and sleep was low on the priorities.

For a few hours I sailed at 10 knots with just a triple reefed main as the wind increased to 30 knots. 12 hours after I had done the final lamination the epoxy was fully cured so I hoisted up the J4 sail on the babystay and saw the boatspeed climb into the high teens for the first time in 3 days.

The waves and wind were from the side of the boat as the wind was northerly, so I could not remove all the slamming, and I spent a lot of time with my head in the ballast tank, looking for any movement and also doing some final improvements to the repair. So far, so good, the repair seems to be holding. There is a lot of material there, as you can see from the before and after pictures, and I hope that is enough to get me to the finish.

Now its just dawn at 1850 GMT and I am awaiting the arrival of a cold front, the wind has already hit 50 knots a couple of times and is regularly over 40 knots. I am on the 4th reef and the J4, which might look like ridiculously small sails on the dock, but are more than big enough out here. The seastate will get worse for a time after the front and this will be another test of the repairs.

It’s good to be racing and sailing again. This morning I finally looked at the positions of the other boats and was fairly happy with where I was in the fleet, still in 10th place and still ahead of Aviva and Akenas, even though they had caught up 300 miles. In terms of latitude I was in a fairly good position as well. Not so far from Roxy and Safran, so there are realistic targets to aim for to try to move up the fleet. But for now, still monitoring the repair and not going to go 100% yet.

Big thanks to the excellent advice from both Tom Faire in New Zealand, and Rob Feloy from Devon, another expert boatbuilder and now yacht surveyor, who has also helped me on plenty of other projects in the past. It was great to be able to talk to you both on the phone to do the best possible job with the materials to hand, it was very much a team effort. Thanks to Andy Dore and Liz Wardley for making up all the spares and to Andy for more boatbuilding tips, I had everything I needed. I was a little dubious about taking a battery powered jigsaw on the race, but am mighty pleased I have it on board now!

Offshore George decided to help out after being threatened to be used as a deck mop.

The repair that I did yesterday with carbon laminate on to the broken longitudinal bulkheads, did not hold because of the very slight movement of the boat, even going as gently as possible. This did not allow the glue to set properly on one side of the crack. Though on the other side of the crack the laminate has bonded really well. So the bond could have been good, it just never got the chance for the glue to stay in one place and harden fully.

It is really a shame as I had put a lot of work into doing a nice job, and it was very disappointing to see the pieces still moving, though perhaps moving a little less than before.

I think that this would have been the right way to do the repair in the harbour, and would have come up with a solution that would get around the world. But I am still 1000 miles from a harbour and with a couple more depressions to sail through before getting to the longitude of Tasmania. We have had to come up with a new approach and with the help of Tom Faire, the boat’s build manager in NZ, we are looking at a whole other solution.

This is to cut up floorboards to stick to the maximum area of the damaged section, and use the thickness of the floorboard to add strength. So that the whole thing sets properly will use a mixture epoxy glue in the area of the original crack, and 5200 adhesive sealant in the rest of the area, plus bolts to hold it in place before the adhesives harden. The 5200 will be very sticky from the beginning and will then harden quicker than the epoxy did yesterday.

I need to cut the floorboard to be a tight fit so that it is also wedges in place, so plenty of cutting and sanding to come. Then have to sand all the surfaces and then add laminate to the floorboard in the area of the old crack to make that area stronger. Plus make backing plates for the inside of the tank, to take the bolts.

I have about 18 hours before the next depression starts rolling through to get it done. I gybed north yesterday and have got into steadily lighter weather, and gotten a little out of the way of the strongest winds. In this depression and the next one I need to test the repair and see if it is going to hold to cross the Pacific. I am completely focused on doing a good repair and carrying on with the race, I have not looked at all where the other boats are, it is likely they are streaking away and I am getting caught from behind, but that is really not an issue until I can get this broken boat mended to restart the race. I am doing a mid ocean pit stop, fortunately still doing 10 knots. The Vendée Globe is a massive challenge in every way and this is just another example of that. I am going to do my absolute best to do a good job and the Bahrain Team Pindar crew are really backing me up.

Thankfully for the first time in the Southern Ocean the weather is benign, there are blue skies and it is actually quite warm, so I am extremely lucky to get this break in the weather to do the repairs.

Right now the Australian Frigate is arriving at Yann’s position, and that is great news, very happy on board Bahrain Team Pindar to hear that news. Will be even happier when he is safely on the ship.

I am in full boatyard mode here, fixing the cracks on the front longitudinal bulkheads. Its an important job that I need to do as well as possible with the equipment on board as, if it fails, I will probably not have enough materials to do it again and that might mean the end of the race if the problem then gets worse.

I have spent all night preparing the work, cutting access holes in the tank lids, cleaning the surfaces, sanding them and cleaning them again. And all day today I have been laminating the port side reinforcements on both the inside and outside faces of the tank. Now I have the starboard side to do, and then reattach the tank top where it has been peeling off. Then tomorrow there is an additional large patch to put on 2 of the sides.

After that, I can start to test it, and I need to get it right before Christmas Eve as there is a large depression coming in then.

Been going slowly to reduce the slamming on the bow. This way, the cracks will move at a minimum as the epoxy glue and carbon fibre are setting hard, it is not ideal to do this at sea with the structure moving, but then the Volvo boats have been doing a lot of carbon repairs, so it should be possible with the wonders of modern glues. Its 6 degrees water temperature here, and so I had to put the epoxy resin and the hardener in the engine box and start the engine to get the epoxy to become less like treacle, and to be able to soak into the carbon fibre strips, and to harden more quickly.

I have hardly been on deck, except to do 2 gybes. Coming out in my white tyvek suit I am blinking in the light, being accustomed to the dark cave of the forepeak, with just a headtorch for illumination.

Out here on Bahrain Team Pindar it’s been a busy time, with gales each of the two nights, so sailing with 3 reefs in the mainsail at night, and during daylight hours the wind dropped. Therefore much sail changing and gybing as the wind constantly changed, as I was passed from one low pressure to the next one. I had no rest until this morning when I grabbed a few hours of naps.

After that I went to look around inside the boat and remove some water that had been leaking through the front hatch. I found more than just water when I saw cracks in the inboard sides of both forward ballast tanks, just forward of the keel bulkhead. These act both to hold the ballast water in and more importantly as longitudinal stiffeners to the front half of the boat. The outboard sides of the tanks are ok, so I have 50% of the longitudinals intact. Today been talking with Nick Black, Boat Captain and Andy Dore, our boat builder and we have all been in contact with the design office, to work out how to proceed. Firstly, how serious is it, and secondly, how to repair it at sea.

Its going to be a big repair involving cutting a hole in the tank top so that I can repair both sides of the crack in the panel, and there is a lot of preparation work to get the surfaces ready to laminate.

Also whilst this is going on, I am still sailing the boat, keeping up the speed, whilst making sure that there is no slamming up forward to make the crack any worse. When I unrolled my J2 tonight for a bit more speed, I saw that it has a big tear on the leech. This is the sail that is permanently lashed on so there is no chance to repair it. I hope that it will be ok for the upwind sections in the Atlantic when the 3DL Kevlar fibres should align themselves ok, and that it is just in running that the leech opens and the tear appears and grows. So no more J2 till Cape Horn, that was my favourite sail, and the most all-purpose sail I had.

Then I had a little struggle to get the watermaker to make water, and that took a couple of hours, as water is essential to keep me going to get all the work done! Got it eventually by using a half full ballast tank as the feed for the watermaker pump.

So at the end of this rather long day, the sun came out for just 5 minutes, and as I went back on deck to see this rare occurrence, there behind me was the most perfect, most unexpected bright rainbow.

An interesting couple of days on Bahrain Team Pindar, as I head towards The Doldrums. The temperature at dawn in the cabin is 33 degrees. Outside its cloudy, grey and humid, but there is a good breeze of 12 knots to propel us southwards.

Tactically I have been trying maybe too hard to gain some advantage (by going into the Verdes) when all I have to do is bide my time. Without the use of the A3 I am bound to be slower at times here, but once we are in reaching conditions then I will be on the pace. I have tried to set up to be one of the more western boats so that it can be a faster doldrum crossing for me. It has been a penalty to get west and the reason for my drop down the rankings. I could have gybed south much earlier and retained my place in the listings, so lets hope that west pays as it often does in the doldrums. I would rather lose a few hours and be a bit too far west than be too far east and possibly lose days, as others have in the past. That’s the theory anyway, though it does not look so pretty at the moment. Sorry all you Bahrain Team Pindar fans, but I will be back!

Yesterday was an interesting day for wildlife, as I was followed by a group of 3 pilot whales, one of whom decided to be a dolphin and play up near the bow and cruise all around the boat as we travelled at 12 knots. The pilot whale looked about 5 metres long, and must have weighed a few tons, so I was happy that his swimming skills kept him away from the keel. After 5 minutes he got called back by his family that were cruising in my wake.

Then later in the day as I was steering, just on the starboard bow a big whale appeared on the surface. He was not moving forward, he was resting on the ocean, and I slid past him, perhaps 3 metres in front of his head. He was at least 10 metres long, and I don’t think he even noticed me till I was past him.
Not sure what type of whale, I had no time to grab the camera as I needed to steer to make sure I got past him safely for both of us.  I have a book on whales and dolphins on board but the closest in my book was a gray whale, which are not in the Atlantic, they were fished out a long time ago. Maybe a baby sperm whale? The skin colour seemed a little green. I should Earthwatch to find out. Next time I will try to get a picture for you!

So still on the big spinnaker and full main, plenty of gybing manoeuvres. This morning before dawn I took the spinnaker down during a routine gybe and went head to wind to let the boat go backwards to clear something that I could hear was wrapped around the keel or the propeller. Seems quieter now, and I can check now that it is light outside with the endoscope to see if the underwater appendages are clear.. The endoscope is a little device I put through the hull, rather like a miniature periscope that is 7mm in diameter. It has a wide angle view and you can see from the bow to the stern and to the bottom of the keel.

Very good for looking at dolphins as well, if you get the chance!

Anyway, back  to the big mess of Cuben Fibre in the forepeak, the A3.

That’s it for now.

Brian

Day 8 of the Vendée Globe and we are just 18 miles from Sao Nicolau island, the most central island of the Cape Verdes.

I will be passing just a couple of miles to windward of the island and then heading off more downwind towards the rest of the island chain to the south, gybing before those islands, and getting some distance in to the west to approach the doldrums.Sao Nicolau is 1300 meters high and I did not want to go to leeward of it.  Fogo, an island up ahead is 2829 metres, literally a volcano coming up from the seabed far below.

This will be the second bit of land I will have seen since leaving Les Sables d’Olonne. Madeira was the previous one. I was not expecting to see any land till Cape Horn so it’s an unexpected bonus, though I will have to be alert to small fishing boats tonight.Its quite hazy today so I can just make out the peak of the mountain at 15 miles out.

I was not expecting to take this route through the islands, but the weather reports from both the European and US models were showing very light winds to the west of the archipelago for when I got there.
Going west would be the route that I would normally want to take. It seems unnatural to come up 20 degrees in a downwind leg, so I hope both the weather forecasts are correct and I get more wind and a windshift towards to NE tonight and tomorrow morning. This windshift will allow me to make up any downwind miles that I have lost to avoid the light air and the islands.Lets hope it works, although at present the winds are dropping rather than increasing, that’s not in the plan…..

The two weather models are wildly divergent on what will happen after the islands. The US model shows 25 knots of wind and the European one 5 knots! Something in between would be fine by me. The doldrums still look messy, and I am sure all the skippers are looking at the satellite pictures, quickscat data and gribs, and still looking at their tea leaves as well.

Last night we finally got moving fast again after 36 hours in light winds,  it was great to feel the boat heel over and the spray start to fly from the bow. It was uncannily smooth sailing as the seas have been so calm for so long, like being on a lake.

The boat worked really well, the only issue was that I could not make any water, which was a little worrying for a while, as I had very little left! In this situation the best option was to fix the watermaker, the second is to use the hand held desalinator, and the third is to raid to 20 litres of emergency water. Fortunately I found that there was no feed water coming into the inlet to the sea, so I used a spare hose leading into a ballast tank to feed the watermaker with its salt water.

Still working on fixing the inlet, which comes off the propeller leg.

So, time for some chilli con carne followed by an Eat Natural bar, and lots of water, as its starting to get hot and humid on board Bahrain Team Pindar..Cape Verdes, here we are!

Brian and George