MAESTRO 40 SAILS FROM FINLAND TO ST. LUCIA
One of the first sailboats ever installed with an Oceanvolt SD motor, the Maestro 40, S/Y Limone, is now heading from Helsinki to Las Palmas to take part in the ARC - Atlantic Rally for Cruisers. As you know it is against race rules to use the motor during the race, but while transferring the boat to Las Palmas from Helsinki we will hopefully get some interesting data from the boat to be published on the website.
The race starts November 22nd and finishes somewhere between December 9th and 14th. The prize ceremony will be held on December 19th. The boat left Helsinki August 20th and arrived in Las Palmas on the 18th of October.
See the race position and location of Limone from this link and read their tweets by following the Twitter handle @sylimone
MESSAGE FROM SKIPPER (22.10.2015)
"11 days and 20 hours from Portsmouth to Canary Islands direct. Log recorded little over 1600 nautical miles through water. Top speed of 13.3kn clocked by skipper, autopilot (now christened as "Jorma") as good second with 13.2kn.
Three different low pressure systems brought us fantastic looking thunder fronts and +50 knots of wind in two different occasions. One from the tail (after rounding Finisterre) was still ok and we made good progress but the second came directly from the nose (as we passed the low centre near Madeira) so we needed to take down all the sails and put a drogue to prevent us going 10 knots in wrong direction with the rig only. Fortunately this shift passed in few hours so we were able to continue sailing to right direction again.
Most of the trip was overcast so we did rely mainly on regeneration for power onboard. It was pretty tight since we did not want to use regen when going towards the wind (which was plenty). We ended up in Las Palmas with SOC of 4% (in reality it was more).
Oceanvolt system worked without any hick-ups. Boat suffered some damage, we had few breaking waves landing directly to the helm station and one tore out a hatch which covers the swimming ladder. Jib sustained also some damage when we broke the furlex reefing line while trying to get the rest of the sail furled once the wind went over 40 knots near Madeira. Crew (Janne, Pekka, Michael and Aleksis) are mostly ok, just some small bruises and minor mental traumas 🙂 " – Janne
