12th Place!

Friday, October 26, 2007, Salvador Bahia

The Transat 650 Bulletpoints – with more stories to come…

• Finished 12th overall; third off the starting line, at worst, Clay was at one point 26th, and ever so gradually made his way back up through the fleet, where he sailed within the top 10 boats until the last day of the race.

• Fastest speed: 17.5 knots in the first few days – during the first several days of the race when in squalls the wind wld increase to as much as 50 knots.

• Scariest moments: Cimbing the mast twice to untangle halyards. And, a few days into the race, when one of many squalls hit and Clay found himself moving so fast downwind that, as he put it, “All I could do was kneel in the cockpit, struggle to keep control of the rudders and hope it would pass before things started breaking all over the place.”

• Damage: Every Mini takes a pounding at sea. In last year’s Mini race from La Rochelle to the Azores, Clay was dismasted 500 miles from the finish; he jury-rigged a mainsail with the good half of the mast and managed to finish to the race.

During this year’s Transat 650, Acadia did not suffer a single crucial equipment failure that Clay was unable to fix enroute. His sails are intact, but for a small rip in one. However, plenty of hardware broke – from turnbuckles and blocks to a spinnaker pole, and by the end of the race, Clay was substituting hardware from one part of the boat to another.

Note to sailors out there: most electronic equipment simply doesn’t stand up to the punishment of sea, salt and bouncing around. Aside from his required GPS transponder, Clay’s wind instruments, a radio, lights, and most important of all for a man who likes his music, one of two iPods and Acadia’s stereo speakers.

Famous last words: “Right now, I want to go somewhere on holiday where I don’t have to look at a line or a rope.”

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