On the 27th we left Conception to Cat Island. Shortly after departing the Neel 47 Vis featured in the video review here followed shortly behind. The sail was a broad reach to run averaging around 160 degrees off the wind. I was very interested to see this trimaran speed machine perform in ocean conditions. The wind was in the high teens so we flew our main and genoa and kept an average speed around 7 to 8 knots. I expected to get our doors blown off but to my amazement the tri kept getting further behind. Eventually they heated up and started gybing at some very high angles which decreased their VMG further and put them out of visual range. The sail made me wonder if the Neel would be a bad choice to cross the Pacific, which is a series of deep downwind runs? After arriving at Cat we were out of our depth. Seriously, we could not find a path as suggested on the charts to get into the anchorage and nearly ran aground multiple times. We wound up anchoring over a mile offshore and were rockin n rollin in some choppy waves. With more wind in the forecast we decided to take off the next day. On the 28th we had an epic close hauled sail back to Elizabeth Harbour. The following day we had trouble getting the dinghy outboard to start after a trip to George Town. The screw to the carburetor jet was broken off so I worked on five other things I could get access to and can report it is up and running again so we are out of boat jail!
