We struggled in vain during the night to sail toward the first of three waypoints Herb Hilgenberg had given out yesterday afternoon. Robin was fighting two evils. The wind was coming from the west-northwest and the course required us to sail northwest, too close to the wind. So we were steadily falling off the pace, although early in the evening we were consistently making over 6 knots, enough to consider reefing.
But then the boat speed dropped, even though the wind remained at 10 to 12 knots. And when I say dropped, I mean like it was chained, along with Wiley Coyote, to a falling anvil. Suddenly we were doing 2.5 knots, 3 knots, 3.8 knots. We had run smack into an adverse current, and that’s the way it stayed as the moon in its second quarter slowly settled toward the western horizon, eventually leaving only stars to light the sky.

And then the wind shifted farther to the north, and we were sailing 40 to 50 degrees away from the waypoint. But we pushed on.

Dawn broke clear, and after a post-sunrise nap, I looked at the instruments and wondered whether I had heard Herb right. A glance at the chart showed that we were within 20 miles of the last known boundary of the Gulf Stream. In fact, we were very close to a waypoint Herb gave on Thursday for crossing the stream, about 100 miles east of the location he now recommended. I began thinking: Would it maybe not make sense to dodge across the stream here?

A call to Herb might answer that question, but lest anyone forget, we are in a race. And the rule says you can’t get outside help that every other racer can’t get. Any racer with a single-sideband radio receiver, such as we have, can listen to Herb at 4 o’clock every afternoon, as we have done. And we had, at times, called him on the sat phone to double check information that didn’t come through the radio clearly.

But this would be a special communication, and I wanted to be sure we were playing within the rules. So a few minutes ago, I phoned Roy Guay (pronounced Gay), the Bermuda One-Two race chairman, and posed the question to him. Roy seems like a very ethical man as well as one accustomed to dealing with reason. He pondered my question and then said: “I don’t think anybody would complain. You’re dead last.”

That’s dead, as in a rat clobbered with the heel of a large boot. Roy added that my proposed phone call would meet the test requiring that other competitors be able to get the same information.

So I called Herb in Burlington, Ontario (if I recall his home town correctly.) Herb is very gracious, even with off hours calls. I gave him our coordinates. He wondered why we hadn’t followed his instructions last night and gone farther west. I explained about the uncooperative wind and currents. Then he said simply: “Go north.”

We is going north. Our bow is piercing the near edge of the Gulf Stream. The wind appears to have dropped, but that is an illusion. The 12 knots of wind was apparent wind. To get that figure, you add your actual speed over the land – say 4 knots in this case – to the speed of the wind blowing in your face – actually 6 to 8 knots here – and you get apparent wind, or 10 to 12 knots.

Now the wind appears to be 6 to 8 knots and is coming from the side. That’s only enough to drive us toward the far side of the stream at about 4 knots as we go on fighting some of that adverse current. Still, we are sailing more directly toward Newport now than at any time in the last few hours.

Herb says the wind will begin to pick up later today – 15 to 20 knots. Tomorrow, we could be facing anywhere from 20 to 35 knots. If the wind is from the southwest as predicted, we could be flying toward that finish line, prepared to claim the prize for most time actually spent sailing.

And can that be a bad thing?