The latest from the sure-to-be-first to finish trimaran Tritium…
Call on the Satphone from Ryan 5 mins ago, worried that his email is not going through…Communications onboard Tritium have been difficult due to problems they’re trying to resolve with the antenna. Navigator Will Oxley spent 2 hours and 21 minutes trying to send 1 photo to the FTP… so unfortunately visual comms are out for now. Thankfully he’s just got the latest weather file.
You might have have noticed about midnight last night they slowed to 13 knots. This is because the 2-1 gennaker block exploded. The block and sail dropped and they had to recover everything out of the water. They replaced the block with a spare and Ryan went up the rig to fix the sheave that exploded as well. They were back up to speed in a couple of hours but had to spend more time making a major repair to the sail. There will be one final trip up the rig in the next hour or so and they’ll be back on track.
To add to the excitement they noticed yesterday that the leeward hull was heavy and found two compartments full of water. Further investigation and they discovered that foam inspection plate seals were not watertight and they reckon they bailed about 1.5 tons of water. Inspection plates have been sikaflexed back in to place to avoid this problem again.
OTHERWISE, all is well!
As Ryan was talking they were at 27 knots. They haven’t seen any other boats yet, its quite grey out there and the visibility is not great. Everyone is in the groove, and acclimatized to the boat movements now. They’re all working well as a team and pulled together very well when the poop hit the fan in the night. Its tiring but its awesome to be ripping along at high speed. They’re all pushing really hard and really looking forward to getting closer to the record.
Check the video from the start here and track them and the fleet here. And thanks to Jay-Z for the title inspiration.
