The Yacht Club Punta del Este gave us a great welcome and we had a couple of enjoyable parties there, including the prize-giving where each team recited a song – ours was called “We all live on a Baltic 55” to the tune of The Beatles “Yellow Submarine”. Some of us managed to take some time off from preparing Outlaw for the final leg and Uruguay has a lot of lovely sites to offer.
I think however the general feeling across the fleet was “lets just get this done”. Obviously, we’d done what we came to do i.e. sail around Cape Horn. We only wanted to get the last leg done to join the dots and complete the circumnavigation! The doldrums are certainly nothing to look forward to and we had a harder time heading north than we had southwards; too many squalls with zero wind behind them, it was slow going at times. But Outlaw did get a morale boost when we realised T9 was behind for a good couple of days, especially as she was in a bigger class than us.
Just 3 days before the finish line on a very dark night, at approximately 3am the backstay snapped. It took a few seconds to realise exactly what had happened but we lowered the jib fast and by sun up, had a new backstay jury rigged to get us home. By then we knew that we were ahead of anyone else within our class so we sailed more conservatively and once again, limped into the Solent with barely any wind. Family and friends came out in ribs to meet us and it was an extremely exciting time to cross the finish line outside the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes and break open that last bottle of champagne. We’d done it!
Ater a brilliantly arranged finish party at the Island Sailing Club, we moved SV Outlaw to Portsmouth and within days, the crew had dispersed, it was surreal. We quickly realised that the finish line was rather bittersweet – great to be home but years of hard work suddenly over. The day we lifted Outlaw at Hamble Point was emotional for Campbell, John & Lucy who were in the campaign from the start. They all walked in different directions to hide their sadness!
