Mini Transat: Light and variable winds

Ninety solo skippers started the first stage of the 2023 Mini Transat, with Peter Gibbons-Neff (USA) sharing the experience of racing his 21-foot Mini Class boat from Les Sables d’Olonne in France to the Canary Islands. Following his Part One and Two reports, he details days 5-8 below:

As the high winds from the front turned into a memory, the night going into the fifth day of racing was light and damp. At one point I moved up to 47th place (I did not know it at the time of course), but mostly hovered around the low fifties. The early morning remained light , upwind sailing with the jib. While we didn’t know exactly what the wind would do, we knew it would eventually fill in and likely from behind. We just needed to be patient and wait.

Another challenge I was facing here was my battery power. Even though I have the solar panels and the hydrogenerator, I was not able to charge my batteries much over the past few days. There was not enough direct sun light, and most of the time I was sailing too slow to effectively use the hydrogenerator. This meant from now on I would be doing a lot of hand steering until I could get a good charge. – Full report

Event information – Tracker – Facebook

After a one day postponement due to storms, the 24th edition of the Mini Transat, reserved for the Mini 6.50, the smallest offshore racing class at 21-feet, saw the first stage get underway on September 25, 2023.

Ninety solo sailors entered the 2023 Mini Transat with the competitors placed in divisions for prototype and production boats.

A notable proving ground for sailors with shorthanded aspirations, it is also test platform for new boat types, with competitors entering in the production division for manufactured boats and the prototype division for custom designs.

Held biennially, with limited participation for safety that includes strict qualification guidelines, the 4,050 nm course is divided in two parts with the combined elapsed time to determine the results:

September 25: Les Sables d’Olonne (France) to Santa Cruz de La Palma in the Canaries (Spain) – 1350 nm
October 28: Santa Cruz de La Palma in the Canaries (Spain) to Saint-François in Guadeloupe – 2700 nm