Well it’s not often that we are out here looking for boring days, but
after yesterday [Sunday] we were crying out for today to be a lot less eventful? So far he says (touching the bit of wood that Killian so cleverly built in to our nav table so that we were always touching it) today has been far smoother sailing. The breeze has slowly been dropping to a now quite sedate 18 knots and it has also come aft so we have been stepping through our downwind sails until for the last few hours we have had our biggest gennaker and our staysail up, and where cruising along doing 20 knots, all very pleasant, if we weren’t all so dead tired it would be even more beautiful sailing out there.

This afternoon has been like a school working bee, the task was to get the boat back to 100 per cent, with still five and a half thousand miles still to go
to Cape Town, we don’t want anything to be too compromised.

The race at the front of the pack is all on, with us, Brazil our younger
brothers on ABN AMRO One, and Ericsson all very close, the young fellas are
north and to the west of the rest of us, and in the race to were we have
too get to in the next few days they are actually winning, even though
they appear fourth based on distance to finish, they have been having a
blinder up there, and doing a great job leading the score board, they have
however, lost a fair few miles in the last two scheds so I hope there not
having any problems.

Good news for us on board today was that Dave Endean was moving around the
boat again and able to do his watches after yesterday taking a heavy wave
while up on the bow and badly straining his knee, Jan and Justin are doing
an ‘Oh so kind and motherly Job’ on making sure though that it is all
strapped up, we have a really good knee brace on board so that is really
helping keeping him all locked in, it was amazing how by having Dave out
of action for a night dropping from 10 guys down to nine was a whole lot
more work.

Good to hear that the Pirates and movistar have arrived safely in
Portugal, I hope they can get repaired quickly and back out here racing as
soon as possible.

Okay, that’s it from me for today, the boys are all in good form apart from
Justin who, as an Irishmen surrounded by five Kiwis, is having a very tough
time that the All Blacks won by more then 40 points against Ireland on Saturday in rugby!

Talk soon

Cheers

Mike