In Marseille where I bought the boat there is this saying among sailors, that there’s either no wind, or way too much. And actually there is a bit of truth about that.
My friend Luca and I decided to spend some free time together doing a sailing trip and testing out the boat. Already at the harbour and on the boat, the meteo forecast got worse.
Our idea was to sail to Ile de Frioule in Marseille, spend a night there and come back. Especially on the second day, the forecast predicted some Mistral to develop. We decided to use the first day to test out the boat in the more moderate conditions of 20-25kts true wind range and then decide if we can handle the more challenging second day with around 30kts of wind.
From a boat testing point of view these various conditions seemed promising. In the worst case it would have been possible to leave the boat at the harbour on the island, even though that would have meant some extra cost.
Day one went smooth and most of our journey was upwind in the predicted 20-25kts of wind. We had a second reef in the main and the full jib up and the boat remained very balanced.
We felt comfortable to tacke the next day and decided to use the opportunity to try out the storm jib, even though it was a very conservative sail choice. Again, the boat remained super easy to control and on that day we mostly had downwind sailing condiitions.
At some point we went upwind, just for the sake of testing and reached apparent wind speeds of more than 40 knots. To my surprise, the boat didn’t show any signs of being overpowered or was difficult to steer.
In some moments I thought, what to do best if there was a more serious problem on the boat, like loosing a rudder. We’d drift pretty quickly towards the nearby shore without a lot of time to react. A pretty scary feeling, as there were also big tankers cruising by and we were in the middle of a traffic separation zone. Luckily everything remained under control and this day proofed to be a great training for stong winds.
When we arrived at the port, some other sailors were quite impressed that we were out today, which was a nice feeling.
Another learning: we attached the stormjib to the frontstay, but maybe it would be better to attach it to the babystay.
Something new to test out next time!
The biggest challenge proofed to be the passage trough the Golf de Fos (which is super ugly by the way).
1. The waves got significantly bigger, I’d say around 2.5m
2. A lot of traffic was going on due to the industrial ports nearby.
3. The wind picked up even more.
