Ellen MacArthur is now 4 days 8 hours 37 minutes ahead of Francis Joyon’s global speed record time.

News from the boat this morning shows that the recent forecast storm wasn’t quite as strong as anticipated but still enough to create big seas and extremely uncomfortable conditions.

Chatting from the boat this morning MacArthur said: “I’m sitting at the chart table – my freezing feet braced in the footstraps below. The window just inches above my head is being constantly lashed with spray, and the surface of the sea that I can see through it as it clears, is strewn with white water. We’re sailing at an average of 20 knots with storm jib and three reefs, and B&Q is just blowing me away. This is her moment, she is dealing with what is going on around us with the biggest heart you can imagine…”

It seems that the worst of the storm has gone through. As the wind starts to decrease and back it’ll go further to the west. MacArthur continued: “It’s started to back and its decreasing, now gone down to 29 knots which is great news although sea state is still terrible, right now, but the breeze is coming round – it’s shifted 20 degrees in the last two hours. It’s been falling for the last hour and I’m going to wait a bit longer but going to change to staysail from the storm jib before it gets dark. I’ve been pretty scared in this one, I was very worried. We’ve been lucky, the most we saw was 47 knots, I was expecting more… The boat’s been amazing – the fact that we managed to sail 115 degrees true wind angle through this whole thing has been our saviour…if we got pushed further south we would have been in big trouble.”