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American Joe Harris along with Roger Junet are competing in the Globe40, a multi-leg doublehanded round the world race in Class40s. Seven teams were at the beginning on June 26, with five teams now on the third leg from Mauritius to Auckland, New Zealand.
After leaving the Indian Ocean island nation on September 11th, Harris files this report from onboard GryphonSolo2 on October 5, 2022:
I must apologize as it has been a while since my last blog post. The main reason for that is that we were sailing upwind for 700 miles and the boat was pounding so bad I could barely type! But let me retrace the steps from where we were, approaching the Eclipse Virtual Gate, which was 60 miles south of the coast of Australia.
I felt from the beginning that this gate made no sense, as we were all sailing along the southern boundary of 42° south latitude in the prevailing strong westerly winds and then had to head 600 miles north into an area of high pressure (no wind) known as the great Australian Bight. It was a real struggle to get to the gate as we had very strong winds from behind for three days and then were becalmed for three days before we finally got around on October 1…
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