Team Seacats

According to BYM News, Francis Joyon on his IDEC sponsored trimaran has been dealing with survival conditions for the last 24 hours in the Southern Ocean.  Chunks of icebergs bob around in the 6 to 7 meter waves (that’s up to 22 feet) while the trimaran struggles to maintain orientation down the wave faces with no sails up and up to 50 knots of wind…only 20 knots shy of hurricane force.  Joyon has not slept much but reports that he is happy as long as the boat continues to make progress and at this point, he’s still making peaks of 20 knots of boat speed. He’s not looking forward to colossal effort required to grind the huge mainsail back up the mast but certainly will be appreciative of the easier sailing conditions to allow him to attend to some outstanding minor maintenance tasks.  He has roughly 1000 miles to go to Cape Horn and is now nearly 8 days ahead of Ellen’s record.