The Time machine
It was 2005 when I heard about an interesting job opportunity and went to an interview into the biggest architecture office in Finland after being ten years out of the office and living as a sailor/skibum. My previous years where filled with offshore sailing, mountaineering, extreme skiing, offshore swimming, caving, iceclimbing and all sorts of crazy stuff. Interview was unfortunately succesfull and behind the desk I was.
In 2010 I woke up behind the same desk. In that day of awakening I realized that someone had stolen five years of my life. I had no memories, no experiences nothing special to remember of those years. That was the day when I invented the Time machine. It is a way of life that builds a storage of ever lasting strong memories and experiences and stops the time so that you can live those moments over and over again.
Next day I had a new plan. This time it was not going to be skiing/sailing bum. There had to be another way. The way was to build my experties and a professional career... into a level where I would have right income and freedom balance. It took four years to build and in 2014 I bought my Class40 FUJI and the Time machine have been on since.
With FUJI there have been two Fastnet Races, two SORC Round The Rock solo version on a same course, Les Sables Horta and full Class40 series in 2017, few Round Ireland Races and Round Britain and Ireland and so on. Storage of the Time machine is full of wonderfull experiences from all of them.
And now we are part of a SIRIUS crew to have a peacefull practice run for our future crossings with FUJI.
Every hour, every minute every second you spend on ocean racing will turn to an eternity in the storage of the Time machine. Even the bad memories will normally render to good ones in the engine of the Time machine.

Ari from SIRIUS Time machine

Dear all, everyone's fine on board.
We have been making south in our route last night and we are now at the latitude of Grenada. We will probably gybe soon. The wind angle was not favorable last night. We are benefitting on the contrary this morning of a favorable angle on the same tack. So we keep to it for as long as possible.

We had problem with the connection again yesterday afternoon but it was functioning perfectly afterwards. So just a little annoyance. We seem to see less weeds. We had to make a reverse every 4 hours to get rid of these in the keel, but it looks that they are sparse here. It is getting better and better over time.

Gery keeps saying that he is going to make a stew of the flying fishes that come unfortunately on board at night. BUt Pietro and I are totally against it. So we have avoided this up to now. We saw a couple of tropical birds yesterday, but no other boat. Not much to say thus.

We are at 700 miles from Grenada and we should have good winds up to there.

A demain.
Pietro, Gery and Catherine

Night 8 Class40 SIRIUS

At this point the watch rhythm of three on and three off is SIRIUSly starting to take effect of your dreams. You can't believe the surrealism of the dreams that feel SIRIUSly real. Some of them are horror stories that actually make you afraid to go to sleep.

Well.... it is time to go on deck. SIRIUS is taking nice little surfs in 10 to 15 knots of wind. Spectacular universe opens up on top of us while we are chasing the stars with the leading edge of the A2 spinnaker. It is a night to enjoy and smiles of our faces will wipe out the bad dreams and we are sleeping like babies. 

Day 9 Class40 SIRIUS

In the beginning of the race there was one white whale and a white walrus from Finland joining the crew. We must be approaching the Caribbean since our skipper commented today was that those creatures have turned in to two shrimps.

It is boiling hot for the Arctic creatures and escaping the sun is the challenge of the day.

We are doing SIRIUSly nice surfing in up to 18 knots of wind. In the middle of the surfs SIRIUS is climbing the mountains of the North Atlantic swell. The swell has been challenged by the building hills of the Trade wind waves. Combined effort of the ridges and valleys is a SIRIUSly interesting labyrinth to helm. Hopefully we will find our way and see you all in a Grenada bar with a cooling iceberg in the rum glass.

Ari and SIRIUS crew.

Dear all,

Everything's fine on board! 

Yesterday afternoon was another of those fine sailing days with an averge wind of 22 knots coming more from East than in the morning, but it cannot be perfect all the time!

With the wind building up in the evening, we gybed and changed spnnakers from A6 to A5. In the not too perfect series of things, there is the fact that we lost another part of the electronics (but still have the essentials, ie the 2nd pilot and the position of the boat on the chart in our nav system). There is also the fact that we are having water in the back compartment of the boat - not a lot, but still in the range of 20 litres very 4 hours - and finally, we have to repair the rudder system from time to time. Apart from that, morale is high.

We gybed again early this morning with a good wind angle. We are on direct route for Grenada. Since yesterday, we have encoutered a lot of weeds, les sargasses. They are everywhere, a little bit more year after year, it seems!

We already had to make a backward manouver to free the keel of them. and we will have to do it again soon. It is easier to free the rudders of them. It is almost impossible to steer with these weeds. I suppose we will see more of them as we arrive closer to the Carribean Islands. Our ETA is now Dec 7 at 22pm UTC as per the nav system.

We are cuurently having more clouds and gusts with an average wind of 24 knots, but gusts up to 29 knots. We run with 2 reefs and the mainsail and have kept our little spi (the A5).

A demain, 
Pietro, Gery and Catherine.