Meat Loaf

Mike “Rail Meat” Hennessy made some final comments on the Bermuda 1-2 organizers’ decision to postpone the start for this important ocean race here, and he wraps up his excellent coverage from onboard his Class 40 “Dragon”:

Sorry about the radio silence in the past 48 hours. My last post had us tacking east to gain some leverage on the fleet. That entire effort put us 20 miles or so east of the Rhumb line when we flopped it over and headed back in the general direction of Newport. I will give the weather gods points on one thing… the conditions were very consistent. Same wind direction (north to NNE) and same wind speed (25 to 30).

As we got up into an area that I would call roughly the lee off Cape Cod, the sea conditions moderated slightly. We still had short period waves, and there was still a lot of crashing, bashing and wetness but it was better than before. In terms of course, we still could not hold Newport but we were doing a damn fine imitation of it in a boat and Class that is not meant to enjoy going dead up wind. Ultimately, we fetched Block Island. We knew that Alex and Nick had 7 miles to go, and we knew that we had about 30 to 40 to go so that was a bit of a bummer. No magical way to cover that kind of deficit in that kind of time.