After a two-year pandemic hiatus, the Clipper Round the World Race is back underway. Having recently completed Leg 6 in Seattle, the fleet has now restarted to begin Leg 7 to Panama. The leg is expected to take 25 to 30 days, with teams expected to arrive in Panama May 25-30.

Ten of the 11 teams left Seattle on Saturday, making their way out the Strait of Juan de Fuca and around Cape Flattery to begin the long haul down the West Coast.

The 11th boat, Qingdao, having diverted to Japan for repairs earlier in Leg 6, is making progress across the North Pacific. She’s heading for San Francisco and is expected to arrive on May 5. They’ll take three to four days for a crew change before rejoining the rest of the fleet in Leg 7. Three Qingdao Leg 7 race crew, Diane Morrison from Australia, Bridget Pugh from the UK, and Qingdao Ambassador Robert Mark, were in Seattle to see the fleet depart. The trio will fly to San Francisco ahead of Qingdao’s arrival this week.

The rest of the fleet will be giving San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge a wave as they sail past.

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In little more than 12 months’ time, Chris Nicholson will have his seventh go at winning the Ocean Race (née Whitbread). And he’s not going to let any leaky clothing slow him down…

After more than 50,000 miles of testing and refinement, Zhik has launched its new OFS800 offshore range. Zhik set out to create the most breathable offshore gear yet seen in the sailing world, and breathability is a cause close to Chris Nicholson’s heart – not to mention his skin…

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“Keep it simple, sailor,” was always our mantra. Aboard our 1985 Niagara 35, Plaintiff’s Rest, my partner, Phillip, and I didn’t have heat, AC, a hot-water heater, generator, watermaker or bow thruster, which meant we also didn’t have to absorb the costs and time required to maintain these kinds of complicated systems. Over the course of seven years, Plaintiff’s Rest’s simplicity also allowed us to learn her every nut, bolt and quirk, until we could fix pretty much any problem ourselves. Sounds perfect, right? Well, we recently sold her and bought a newer, more costly, harder-to-handle and far more complex boat. In short, we ditched our previous simplicity and went for broke. Go on, ask me: Why would we change tacks this way?

The answer: we found ourselves in a header. That old racing wisdom to tack on a header rings as true in life as it does in sailing. Things are always changing. The seasoned sailor must constantly monitor the conditions, consider their impact on her current course and adjust as needed. When you’re sailing upwind and the wind shifts toward your bow—a header—it will force you onto a heading farther away from your ultimate destination. When you come about, you change course to the tack that’s been lifted, so that you are once again on the most direct path to your end goal. Is it guaranteed the new wind direction will hold and your tack will prove to have been the right thing to do in the long run? Never. That’s all part of the fun of pitting your skills and senses against the constantly changing conditions to make them carry you to your end goal. Am I still only talking about sailing here? Or is this starting to sound like something a bit more general?

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Ahead of the start of the Pure Ocean challenge between Bermuda and Lorient next month, which will resurrect the infamous series of races that took place over 40 years ago, those involved in this and historic editions have reflected on the importance of the route and its resurgence.

Back in 1979, the first edition of the race saw Jean-Claude Parisis and Olivier de Rosny on the monohull Fernande finishing third as Éric Tabarly and Marc Pajot on Paul Ricard were beaten into second place by Eugène Riguidel and Gilles Gahinet with just 5 minutes and 42 seconds separating the top two boats.

Olivier de Rosny said: “It was such a pleasure to race in this competitive boat and I can remember passing the banks of Newfoundland with winds of 30 knots which was a lot more than the other boats who were following a route further south.

“When we finally arrived in Lorient we were both very surprised at how many people were there to welcome us back and we were inundated with letters congratulating us on our achievement.”

Olivier de Rosny believes that resurrecting the crossing challenge is a great opportunity for boats to return to France after the Caribbean racing season…

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In the fourth part of a  series, IMOCA and The Ocean Race retrace the history of the crewed round the world race, focused on French sailors. We particularly liked this passage:

Before the voyage, Bernard Deguy put together a reading panel with the future academic, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, and his cousin Michel Deguy, a philosopher and poet. “When we set sail from Saint-Malo and headed to the race start in Portsmouth, each of the ten crew received ten books free of charge and were tasked with reading them… something that would be quite unthinkable today in The Ocean Race…

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This is the Kernan 68 Peligroso, fresh off their ORR overall win in the N2E race, entering Mission Bay. According to boat captain Keith Kilpatrick, “it looked worse than it was.”

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No, not the white wintery fluffy type of snow! Depending on where you live there could be snow in April, but this time it’s snowing in the ocean! As long as there’s been marine life, it’s been snowing – a mixture of flakes that are mostly composed of dead things – animal carcasses, feces, mucus, viruses, dust, etc making their way into the depths.

This actually helps trap carbon in the seafloor, but now microplastics are starting to show up in this snow and is harming nature’s cooling process. A recent model found 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters…

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At 6:04 p.m. on Thursday, April 21, Jzerro and Ryan Finn passed under the Golden Gate Bridge in an amazing display of seamanship, boat design and adventure. But the last miles to the Gate were not easy. In his only downbeat post during the whole trip, he mentioned the frustration. “I was hoping to glide under the Golden Gate Bridge at noon today, and that was a conservative estimate. Well that’s well out of the window now. I’m drifting at 3 knots toward S.F., which is unbearable at this point. 56 miles at 3 knots is far, far away.

“Clearly the Pacific is not done with me, and punishing me for assuming there would be stable wind for the final part of this voyage. Assume nothing. My friends and family are already in S.F. waiting. It hurts to think that I could be out here for another day, but I have to accept that as a possibility. Unfortunately, the only entertainment I have on board is waiting for a weather file to download, so I’m partially at fault for continuing to suckle at that teat of misinformation. I now look at the weather models the way I look at a children’s show, with the costumed host singing and dancing in front of a smiling sun and inflatable trees. Meanwhile, I’m stuck in what feels more like a David Mamet play.”

We’ve been there too, waiting just outside the Gate, knowing it’s windy just ahead but it’s taking forever. Ryan and Jzerro finally received enough wind to make it on a flood current in daylight. At the Richmond Yacht Club docks, Ryan summed up the journey. “It’s pretty presumptuous for me to think I can sail nonstop from New York to San Francisco in a 36-ft boat, right? By the time I got to Brazil I thought, ‘If I just make it around Cape Horn, that’s all I want.’ Leaving New York in winter was hard as shit. Getting around the Horn was hard. Going up the Pacific Coast is hard. This was a hard trip. Those guys that did this in square-riggers were incredible.” And he did all that singlehanded. Incredible.

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