Louay Habib 10.08.06
The SevenStars Round Britain and Ireland continues today with the leaders experience some pretty sever weather conditions on the west coast of Ireland. Currently winning the race on corrected time, Kingspan Chieftain
are beating into head winds gusting up to 33 knots and are just south of Black Rock off the coast of Galway.
Kingspan Chieftain’s navigator Jochem Visser spoke by satellite phone about the conditions on board;
“It is really uncomfortable down below and really wet on deck, it is pretty wet down here as well as I lost the battle to stay on the toilet this morning, I won’t go into any details but it was quite messy! We also had some problems with the code 3 gib which blew the tack shackle off and damaged the luff tape. After a few hours stitching it is all back together now. ”Mike Broughton of winningwind.com has sent this analysis of the weather picture;
“The lead boats are experiencing strong north westerly winds of between 23-33 knots coming from Iceland and the seas state is adding to the discomfort of beating into this head wind with waves of about 3 meters.Ocean weather buoys in the vicinity are showing 2 knots north westerly. These conditions are likely to remain the same for a while possibly until Saturday morning.
Further back in the fleet in the vicinity of the Fastnet Rock, the fleet are experiencing north westerly winds of 18-25 knots generated by a low pressure system in the North Sea and affected by a high pressure system 300 miles off the south west of Ireland.”
