Our route through the canaries. When we gybed away from the pack we felt uneasy about it, but we felt that the big shift to more easterly winds would allow us to cope with better breeze on the African Coast. I think that we underestimated the good shifts everyone else was getting down that coast, as well as better breeze, and it quickly became apparent that we were going to have to take our medicine and get back in touch with the fleet. The obvious route was to slip down the west coast of Lanzarote, but we thought we would try and use some of the leverage we had created and take the passage between the two tallest islands in the Canaries. The wind did accelerate to 26 knots but only for two hours and we have left ourselves with a lot of work to do over the next few days. The fleet by the coast will probably extend in better pressure and we can only hope that some shift to the east will help to mitigate the loss.

Ian Moore