News from Spaniel

The start of our voyage was pretty quiet. The right time for the new crew to get adapted to the ocean – the wind was around 16 kts and speed of 7 kts. Despite the fact that the start of the race was favorable, most of the crew still lives on water and ship’s biscuits. Around 3:00 at night, when barometer had fallen 3mb’s an hour, we caught the “tail” of the cyclone together with a local thunderstorm and gusts up to 52kts, rain and thunder. Lightning hit us so closely that Andris, as a photographer admitted he had never seen so perfectly illuminated night.

Received the message from Race control - 25/05 14:00 UTC Finish at sea. It looks like the last secret weapon of our captain - his special red socks - will be no help this time!

This morning's calculations show that it is exactly 9 days since we crossed the start line and wehave managed to complete 1624 NM. That means average 180 miles a day and 7,5 knots of average speed which is not bad at all!

We are around 1460 NM to the finish and close to the middle of the race. Yesterday we were using our butterfly and speeding at around 7 knots, but last night we managed to break also our speed record for this race. The record of 11.4 knots now belongs to Muris. The other record for the last day belongs to barometer - 1030 mb!

The hottest breaking news from the deck came just before 14:00 UTC when Libca was preparing to send our position to race control. We finally got lucky and Muris managed to catch a fish. It was 54 cm long dorados (not sure about the name). It took us more than 50 euros of lost lures and a sacrificed cockpit knife to get till that fish but it was definitely worth it!

Friday was the shower day ( to remind, SPANIEL is no equipped with the shower). We used our "jaccuzzi" for this purpose also using the water from the water purifier which has been nicknamed Johnny the moaner. He lives in the back storage and Liga is already seeing some dreams with its unusual soundtrack. Instead of 5,6 l/hour it produces around 5, but it's ok and we are more than satisfied with the quality of the water. Thanks to Gandrs!

Today, early in the morning at 4:48 SPANIEL lead by captain Juris Radus crossed the start line of the main race to Bermudas. The start line was moved 200 NM to the south due to the light winds. Before that we had a chance to spend two and a half beautiful days in Las Palmas.

Time: 08:30 UTC Our position is 28*48.979N 014*51.107W There are 48.33 nm left until the finish line in Las Palmas. Yesterday until the sunset we were running away from still (no wind) in all possible ways. NOT succeeded!

May 4th, 19:40UTC: 31*25'41N 013*15'64W; cog210*, sog6.7kts, dst224.4Nm,twa70*tws10kts Our celebration feeling - putting on the white table cloth to celebrate not only the regaining of Latvia's independence, but also a birthday of our Captain for R2 from Las Palmas to Bermuda. BArmen! Hip-hip- hurray! (x3)

Good night for us and good morning for you! At 4:25 AM our position is 34o33'124W 011o30'817N, Cog = 280o, true boat speed = 6.5 kts, wind from 140o , with speed of 14kts and 430NM to the first intermediate finish near Canary Islands. The last weather forecast predicts that we are expecting silence the next day. That is why it was decided at 1:30 to make a tack and go further into the ocean to catch some wind.